


They Alone Keep in Memory

by BrigidsBlest



Series: They Alone Keep in Memory [1]
Category: Wolverine (Movies), X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men (Original Timeline Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-19
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-06 15:18:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 16
Words: 64,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13414011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrigidsBlest/pseuds/BrigidsBlest
Summary: Charles Xavier was quite the player during his youth. All those one-night stands, and never any children? Seems unlikely.Quite impossible, in fact. Unfortunately, the daughter he doesn't know about wakes as a mutant herself, and instantly runs afoul of some of the most terrible of the X-Men's foes.





	1. The Abduction of Lore

**Author's Note:**

> First chapter takes place between X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse.
> 
> Subsequent chapters take place after X-Men: Apocalypse.

_“Pay heed to the tales of old wives._

_It may well be that they alone keep in memory_

_what it was once needful for the wise to know.”_

_― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings_

 

 

**Westchester, NY**

**Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters**

**Tuesday, September 12, 1978**

 

            These days, Charles Xavier mused, it was like the Cold War all over again—his X-Men, Erik’s faction, Stryker’s Weapon X program, the Hellfire Club…so many groups, all warring to be the ones to find and draft the next big mutant whose powers manifested.

            The thought had barely crossed his mind when Cerebro’s alarm went off, and a wave of psychic power akin to the detonation of a mental nuke went off inside his skull, blinding and stunning him. Even as Scott and Ororo and Hank all turned toward him with shouts—and as Jean and Betsy keeled over—he slumped in his chair, unconscious.

 

 

 

**Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin**

**Mt. Horeb High School**

**Tuesday, September 12, 1978**

 

            Lauren Drake clamped her hands to her mouth as she stared around her at the two dozen other girls in her freshman-year phys ed class—and the teacher—all lying flat and apparently unconscious on the gymnasium floor, and tried not to scream. She had been suffering from a massive headache all day, worse than any migraine ever, that had been slowly building ever since she had gotten on the school bus to come to class that morning. It had gotten so bad by lunch time that she had spent the entire lunch period in the restroom throwing up instead of eating. When phys ed class had rolled around, she had tried to beg off, asking for permission to go to the nurse’s office; not only was the headache still growing, but she was dizzy from hunger after losing all of the morning’s breakfast into a toilet bowl.

            But the teacher had refused, and so she had pulled on the black shorts and sky-blue t-shirt that were the standard gym uniform, tied her sneakers, pulled her long blonde hair back in a ponytail, and headed out to the gym, where teams were being picked for volleyball. She hung back as much as she could, praying that she would be picked last so she could find a spot in the middle where it was least likely the ball would come to her.

            Exactly three minutes into the first match, the ball had, of course, come soaring over the net directly for her. She stumbled forward, hands locked together to try to smash it back, but it had hit her in the forehead, instead.

            There had been a moment of insanely sharp agony, as if someone had jammed an ice pick into her brain, enough to lock every muscle tight, tears rivering down her face. She could _feel_ every thought in her brain exploding outward like lightning bolts, could imagine it striking down everyone around her for miles.

            And then the pain had vanished.

            When she had opened her eyes at last, ready to apologize for screaming—she was sure she had screamed—her classmates and teacher lay prone and unmoving around her on the ground, much like a forest of felled trees. She gaped for a second and then knelt quickly to press her fingertips into the throat of her friend Lily, who was closest. She could feel the other girl’s pulse fluttering sluggishly under her touch, and she was breathing, but no matter how Lauren shook her, Lily did not wake.

            She moved from student to student, almost hyperventilating as she checked for signs of life. They were all alive, but unmoving, unreactive even when she pinched them.

            She moved, at last, to Coach Lanier, the gym teacher.

            Who was not breathing.

            Lauren moaned as she tried vainly to find a pulse in the man’s wrists, then his throat, but there was no sign of life there, and his eyes were open, dully staring at the gym’s ceiling.

            She bolted to her feet. “Help!” she shouted, eyes wide, and ran for the door that led out to the hallway. The clock on the wall over the door said it was almost time for the next class change; _how long_ had she stood there clutching her head after the ball had hit her?

            She stopped in her tracks as soon as she emerged through the doorway. Out in the corridor, dozens of students lay collapsed on the ground, books and papers and pens littering the ground around them, laying where they had fallen. Lockers stood open and teachers lay by open classroom doors, eyes wide open.

            Lauren was shaking as she checked the pulses of the closest half-dozen students. All were alive, though unconscious.

            All the adults were dead.

            She screamed, running through the hallways, up the stairs to the second floor, searching through the library, the cafeteria, and finally the admin offices. It was the same everywhere she set foot: the students, the teenagers, were all alive but all but comatose. The teachers, the janitors, the librarians—all the adults, over fifty of them—were all dead.

            “What…what happened?” she whimpered, tears streaming down her cheeks, her face pallid and terrified. She approached the phone on the desk of the secretary in the front office, dialing ‘9’ first, then 0 for the operator to call for ambulances, police, firemen. Had there been some sort of gas leak, or poison? Carbon monoxide?

            “Then why…am I…awake? Alive?” the 13-year-old wondered. Her fingers clenched the phone receiver to her ear, waiting for the operator on the other end to answer.

            There was no answer.

            She snapped, then, dropping it and racing out of the office, down the front steps of the school, bursting through the front door out into the sultry late summer afternoon. The only thought in her mind was to get home to her mother, to her home. Her father would be at work still, but her mother…

            She came to a jittery stop as she reached the curb, breath hitching in her lungs. Not far down the street, a car had come up against a telephone pole, the front grille smashed in, steam rising from the breached radiator. The man who had been driving the car was slumped back in his seat, one arm dangling out the window, not moving. Down the street in the other direction, the first of the school buses that had lined up to take kids home when school got out stood idling. The driver, who had stepped out of the bus to have a cigarette on the sidewalk, lay face-down in the gutter, half his hair singed off by his dropped cigarette. He, too, was unmoving.

            Further in the distance, she could see other cars. None of them were moving, and the drivers of all of them were still.

            It was only when she looked around and realized that the dark shapes dotting the ground everywhere in sight were dead birds, dropped in mid-flight by whatever had affected the humans, that she screamed—shrill, harsh—and ran.

            It was over two miles to her home. She had to stop, panting and wheezing, before the end of the first mile. Her panic had broken herself against her exhaustion, and slowly, bits and pieces were fitting together in her mind. The clock on the gym wall had said it was nearly two in the afternoon. Class had started at 12:55. She had stood there holding her head while pain rolled through her—and afterward—for almost an hour.

            Dimly, something else was starting to surface. In history class, the teacher had talked about how mutants had interfered with the Cuban missile crisis, back in 1962. The year that Lauren—and most of the other freshmen—had been born. Mutants, with their weird powers.

            She had wondered for the briefest moment whether a mutant had been responsible for what happened to everyone, but then realized that, whoever had done it, if it had been a mutant, would not have left her unscathed.

            Unless…

            “No,” she whispered. A mutant’s power didn’t affect the mutant themselves. “No, no, it can’t be, I can’t be…”

            She dug her nails into her palms, trying to chase the damning thought away with pain; blood welled up around her nails, spilling to the side, and then, the tiny crescent-shaped cuts she had gouged into her skin vanished, healing up as if they had never been. She choked, the sound that left her throat faint and broken as her body gave her mind all the proof she needed.

            Her head lifted, a picture of misery crossing her face as she realized she was hearing two distinct sounds at the same time, but differently. The heavy sound of rotor blades—a helicopter’s blades—came churning through the air to her ears. They were paired with the sound of big trucks, Jeeps, rumbling as they approached the school.

            And the sounds of whispers, words from many different voices—adult, male, scared, angry, hostile—rippled through the aether to her mind. _New mutant. Dangerous. Catch her. Stryker’s orders. Weapon X program._

            She ran.

            Before she got half a block, an olive-drab truck, stenciled in military markings, roared out from a side street and turned sideways, blocking off the road. Men in army uniforms poured out of the back, carrying long guns of some sort, the expressions on their face an unholy mixture of fear and rage and revulsion.

            She screamed and darted in through the gate of the nearest house’s yard, eyes flitting over the body of the plump, middle-aged woman laying near the flower beds, a watering hose still clutched in her hand, the water flowing and pooling deep enough to cover half her face. No air bubbles came up from her submerged nose and mouth, and Lauren realized the woman— _Mary Donovan, 52, goes to the Methodist Church on Sundays, sings in the choir, two children, never told her husband before he died of a heart attack last year that she’d cheated on him with the mailman for three months **how do I know that?**_ —was dead.

            They raced after her, aiming their guns, and she wailed, already anticipating the agony of bullets slamming through her flesh, striking her down. _But if I’m a mutant, if I killed all those people—oh, god, I deserve it! I didn’t mean to do it, but I did it! I don’t know how, but—_

            Something sank into her shoulder with a hissing thwip, stinging like a bee’s sting would, and she spared a glance over her shoulder, still running. A tiny metal dart stuck out of the skin, a fluff of bright orange fletching on the end. A faint wave of sleepiness passed over her and then faded, even as she yanked the dart out of her skin and threw it down. The pinprick injection site vanished immediately, and she ran. They were catching up—adults with their longer legs and their military training and physical fitness against her with her hatred of gym class, no contest no matter how slim she was—and she panted in desperation.

            Another sting came to her right hip, just at the area where it met her back, and she reached around without looking to yank out the dart, throwing it away, not stopping in her escape as she barreled through the back gate of Mrs. Donovan’s yard, trampling the peonies as she smashed past them. She could hear additional hisses now as she ran, as they got closer; some of them missed, but she felt three hit her, one in the back of her left thigh, one just below her right shoulderblade, one in the back of her neck. The sleepiness was stronger now, as they pumped their tranquilizer cocktail into her body, but she yanked them out, threw them down, stumbled, staggered. She was running more slowly now, her body fighting to get rid of the drugs, and then she went down hard, the toe of her shoe catching in an uplifted piece of the sidewalk where a tree root had dug under it and grown.

            The sidewalk took the top layer of skin off both her knees, and it stung, leaving her blood on the sidewalk as she struggled to get to her feet again.

            Then a hand closed around her upper arm and she screamed as she was yanked up to her feet by one of the soldiers. His hand dug in to the scant meat of her bicep, hard enough to leave bruises that faded in a heartbeat, just as the skin on her knees had regrown itself, leaving not even a scar to mark that she had been hurt.

            “Get the collar on her!” the commanding officer roared as he brought up the rear, outrun by a dozen soldiers bearing guns and one carrying a metallic collar, circuitry studding its length and width. Blue and red lights gleamed here and there. Another soldier grabbed her other arm, two grabbed her legs, even as she kicked and screamed and fought to get loose, her 78 pounds no match for them. The soldier with the collar stepped closer to twist it open along a central hinge, fitting it around her neck, closing the latch with a click, and then all the malicious whispers—and one very savage, animalistic snarl that had been rumbling closer and closer—simply died, as if they had been coming from a radio that was shut off.

            One of the other soldiers lifted his weapon and shot her again, the dart burying itself in her stomach, and immediately a wave of heavy lassitude spread through her veins, dragging her limbs down like lead weights, making it an effort to keep her eyes open.

            “Excellent,” the commanding officer pronounced. “Get the shackles on her while I contact Stryker. He’s going to want to know we’ve got her. We can be back at base in—”

            There was a roar.

            It sounded as if the world’s oldest, most vicious man-eating lion had been let loose from its cage after being starved for years.

            Something warm and wet and red splattered Lauren’s face as the soldier holding her right arm rocked on his feet and then screamed, dropping her wrist as he fell back to the ground and did not move. She slumped toward the sidewalk, unable to stay standing. The two soldiers holding her legs were knocked back by something brown and gold, something feral that looked vaguely like a man but moved much more like a tiger.

            The soldiers were screaming, bringing their guns up and firing, darts slamming into the hugely-muscled, massive form. The darts had no effect, and the man holding her other wrist fell back, his hand tightening around her wrist almost hard enough to shatter bone before his fingers uncurled loosely and his head toppled off its shoulders.

            She fell, groggily managing to keep her eyes pried open as the attacker went through the soldiers like a scythe through wheat. The commanding officer was screaming into a military mobile radio, and then his guts were splattering against the ground as the creature eviscerated him with a swipe of taloned hands.

            The figure turned toward her, padding on deft feet over to where she lay, seizing her by one thin wrist and lifting her up to stare at her. Short, buzz-cut dark hair with muttonchop sideburns flanked amber eyes that almost glowed in the sunlight. He smiled as he lifted her up to his face, his nostrils flaring as he sniffed at her like a dog. The smile exposed sharp, pointed canines, fangs that would do any tiger proud. “Familiar smell…where have I smelled that before?” he growled gutturally. “Who do you smell like, babe?”

            She cringed back away from him as much as her impending lack of consciousness and the strength of his grip—which was almost pulverizing her wrist—would allow, terrified.

            He took another long whiff and then grinned, the darkness in his eyes flashing in vicious delight. “You smell like Chuck. You’re Xavier’s brat?” He grinned at her and she felt her bladder let go at the world of pain that smile promised. “Oh, yeah…you should be afraid. You’re worth gutting Stryker’s team. Glad I bothered to come along and check this out.”

            With his other hand, he was plucking darts from his own hide, dozens of them, tossing them onto the sidewalk as if they were so much trash. He lifted her up and slung her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, shaking his head. “You’re comin’ home with me, babe. You and me, we’re gonna be such good friends. I ain’t had a new toy for months. You’re just what the doctor ordered.”

            Horror passed through Lauren in a dizzying wave, and she let go of her hold on consciousness, praying with all her might that this was just a hallucination, born of the migraine, and that when she opened her eyes again, she would be laying on the cot in the nurse’s office, and everything she had just seen and endured would be no more than a bad dream.

            The laughter of the man carrying her away from her family and home echoed in her ears as she fell down into darkness.

 

\---

 

            “Erik,” Charles said tightly, a thin smile on his face as he acknowledged his old friend.

            “Charles,” Erik Lensherr responded, nodding. “You’re too late. The mutant that manifested here is already gone.” He nodded at the corpses flung everywhere, the cooling entrails on the ground, the blood splatter patterns that decorated the sidewalk in wide fans.

            “So I see,” Xavier said grimly. “The soldiers wear the uniforms of Stryker’s men.” Behind him, he heard Wolverine growl. “I shudder to think of another child in their hands. Nonetheless, we have to do what we can.”

            Magneto inclined his head in a chilly nod. “I rather doubt Stryker has the child,” he said coolly. “Given the vast amount of carnage indicated, I rather think a third party interrupted them in taking him or her.” He shrugged. “The question, then, is whether the new mutant will be better off in the hands of whoever it was that tore through Stryker’s forces like a hot knife through butter. I rather doubt it.”

            Xavier and his students had arrived at Mount Horeb to find unimaginable devastation. Nearly half the town’s adults—anyone over the age of 20 or so—were dead of massive brain damage, apparently caused by psychic attack. Those younger than that age had been rendered unconscious by the assault, but their still-developing, more pliable brains had weathered the spasms better than the adults whose brains were fully formed; none had died.

            The attack seemed to be focused on the high school; _all_ the adults there were dead, and then fewer and fewer in concentric rings spreading outward from the site, like ripples in a pond after a stone had been dropped into still waters. Not quite a mile from the school, they had found the scene of devastation—and Magneto, carefully studying the deaths of the soldiers. Xavier had dispatched Jean and Betsy—still nursing their own headaches from the resonance of that massive psychic burst, even half a country away from Mount Horeb—to try to comb through the records at the school and determine if any of the students were missing.

            They had to work fast; the children would be waking up soon, though Hank had checked out numerous students and determined their health was sound. But the remaining adults in the town would no doubt have called for help from the state, and the governor had dispatched the National Guard, who would be arriving in less than an hour. That left them very little time to try to figure out what had happened.

            Behind him, Logan growled again, the sound a hot whiplash of fury. “Stinkin’—” Xavier turned to meet his furious glare. “Chuck, Sabretooth was here. All these dead soldiers, they got his stink all over ‘em.”

            Xavier winced. “Then whatever child was taken here is in even more danger,” he said darkly. “Were you able to find anything out about him or her?”

            Logan lifted up a small tranquilizer dart; they had found them scattered all over the sidewalk, and further back in a line between this spot and the high school. “Girl,” he said, sniffing at the needle that would have been buried in the new mutant’s flesh. “Other than that, there’s too little ta work with here, an’ it’s been too long. Scent starts dyin’ off soon as it’s exposed ta air.”

            “Even so, that will narrow down the records Jean and Betsy have to work with by half,” he said. He lifted a hand to his temple, reaching out telepathically to the other two psis of the X-Men. ~ _Jean, Betsy…Logan says the new mutant we’re looking for, the missing student, is a girl. Concentrate your searches there.~_

            Jean answered back almost at once. _~We’ve gone through most of the school, Professor,~_ she ‘sent’. ~ _So far, we’ve only found one student missing who was listed in the records as being in attendance today. Lauren Drake, 13 years old, missing out of her gym class—which seems to have been the epicenter for the attack, if the intensity of the brain damage to the dead gym teacher is any indication. His is the worst we’ve seen so far; his brain is the consistency of pudding.~_

            “I will leave you to your good work, Charles, “ Erik said, his tone mildly sneering. “I came only to make certain that the mutant who awakened here did not fall into the hands of Stryker’s filth, but it seems Sabretooth took care of that little task already.”

            “You would leave, knowing the danger a young woman might face in Sabretooth’s hands?” Charles asked, frowning.

            “My war is not with other mutants unless they oppose what I intend to do, Charles,” Magneto said. “Consider yourself fortunate that I am not interested in paying you back for our previous disagreements here and now.” He crossed his arms over his jacket-clad chest and shook his head. “The time will come when you will see we still have far more in common than otherwise, and you will join me.”

            “Never,” Xavier said heatedly.

            Erik merely smiled thinly and rose into the air on a wave of magnetic force, looking regal and fearsome as he soared away.

            Behind him, Xavier heard Logan spit. “Never liked that guy,” he growled.

            Xavier turned. “Logan, can you track Creed’s scent?” he asked.

            Logan nodded curtly. “See what I can do,” he replied. “Ain’t likely he carried her far, though.” He knelt, nostrils flaring as he sniffed at the sidewalk, and then began to walk around, trying to find where the scent was freshest. He stopped a dozen feet away. “His scent here joins the girl’s. Hers is faint, I think he _was_ carryin’ her, over his shoulder—leastways, her feet weren’t touchin’ the ground.” He jerked his head to the east. “They went that way.” And he hurried off.

            Xavier glanced over at the rest of the team. Beast was with Jean and Betsy, but Bobby, Scott, Colossus, and Raven were searching the area around them. “Scott,” he called. “I need to follow Logan.”

            Scott nodded, coming up behind the Professor and guiding his chair forward. “Let’s see what we can find,” the ruby-visored mutant agreed.

            Logan tracked Creed’s scent down two and a half blocks to a small white one-story house with a picket fence and a tire swing hanging from the thick bough of an oak tree in the front yard. Roses and pansies and petunias filled the flower beds in the front by the windows. A station wagon sat in the driveway.

            The front door was hanging open.

            Logan emerged from the house with a grim look. “Man and a woman inside, both slashed to bits. More’a Creed’s work. Two bedrooms, master bedroom and a kid’s room. I think this was her house, Chuck,” he said. “Mail in the mailbox is addressed ta Mr. and Mrs. Drake.” He scowled. “But…” He shook his head. “House was ransacked. Drawers opened, a small safe emptied. Kid’s room is decorated in pink. Stuffed animals, one’a those little record players.” He held a framed photo in his hand and passed it over to the Professor. The family portrait showed an adult couple—slightly on the chubby side, dark-haired, dark-eyed. The little girl standing between them was slim, blonde, blue-eyed, looking nothing like her parents. She bore the sort of delicate, innocent loveliness that promised to grow up into breathtaking beauty.

            Xavier mentally passed the girl’s image along to Jean and Betsy, and Betsy responded at once. ~ _That matches the mental image of Lauren Drake in her classmates’ minds,~_ she replied. _~Is that confirmation, then?~_

            _~Wolverine was able to identify the scent of her abductor as belonging to Victor Creed—Sabretooth,~_ Xavier responded grimly. ~ _Creed found the girl’s home and slaughtered her parents._ ~

            The disgust and worry from the two telepaths flowed back over their mental conversation in a visceral wave. _~Professor, Creed is…not known to be…humane with his captives, and the only thing I can think he’d want a young girl for is--~_ Jean’s words broke off in a wash of horror and fear.

            Xavier nodded in response, though they could not see it, and looked up at Logan. “Can you follow further?” he asked.

            Logan grimaced. “There was a second car here originally, prob’ly the dad’s,” he said. “The station wagon smells like the mom. Other car ain’t here, I think Creed took it. I can’t track a car by scent, Chuck. They don’t have much diff’rent smells like people do. They all mostly smell’a metal an’ gas an’ oil.”

            “Do your best,” Xavier said wearily. He eyed Logan, the terse look on his face, the tension limning every muscle. “There’s something else?”

            Logan growled. “There’s somethin’… _familiar_ ‘bout th’ girl’s scent, but I can’t put my finger on it. Might be easier if the scent was stronger, but her ma changed her bedsheets an’ blankets this mornin’, an’ th’ old ones went through the wash already. Can’t smell much other than laundry detergent an’ fabric softener there. It’s too faded in th’ rest of the house t’ make out.”

            “Unfortunate,” Xavier sighed. “I’m going to return to the Blackbird. Hopefully we can trace the girl with Cerebro before Creed gets too far with her.”

            “Chuck…” Logan warned. “Stryker’s men use those power-dampenin’ collars Trask made up back when. If they had one’a those with ‘em—an’ Creed knows damn well how they work from when me an’ him were workin’ for Stryker’s outfit, an’ woulda likely put it on her if he thought she was dangerous—she ain’t gonna be trackable.”

            Xavier grimaced and looked up. “Scott, get me back to the Blackbird,” he ordered.

            “Yes, Professor,” Scott said, hurrying to wheel Xavier back to where their jet was parked, and Logan turned to the unenviable task of trying to track one car out of a thousand or more.


	2. Wrack and Ruin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five years later...all is not well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Team members are all messed up on the timeline, of course. Hadn't rewatched the movies in awhile. Might as well call this an AU.

_“Many abused children cling to the hope that_

_growing up will bring escape and freedom._

_But the personality formed in the environment_

_of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life._

_The survivor is left with fundamental problems_

_in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative._

_She approaches the task of early adulthood_

_――establishing independence and intimacy――_

_burdened by major impairments in self-care,_

_in cognition and in memory, in identity,_

_and in the capacity to form stable relationships._

_She is still a prisoner of her childhood;_

_attempting to create a new life,_

_she reencounters the trauma.”_

_― Judith Lewis Herman, from_

_“Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence”_

 

 

**Montana**

**A small cabin in the mountains**

**Wednesday, May 4, 1983**

            The scent of blood hung heavy in the plain concrete subcellar, buried deep beneath the small cabin.

            Creed stretched, grinning, and rose from the filthy mattress on the floor. The scent of sex hung heavy cheek-and-jowl with the scent of blood, and he licked drops of scarlet off his talons as he got to his feet, staring down at the thin figure curled up on the mattress, blood seeping from ragged slashes in her back and hips and thighs. “You always know just how I like it, babe,” he chuckled coarsely. He kicked the long steel chain that led from the manacle around her left ankle into the wall; the chain was as thick as her calf, eyeing the crusted blood around the manacle, sniffing at the scent of rot that came from her ankle and foot. The skin there was darker, the flesh under the manacle tightly indented.

            “I gotta go out a few days,” he grunted, reaching for the shirt and jeans he had thrown onto the floor in the corner by the ladder that led down from the cabin above. “I’ll bring down water and food before I go. Can’t have my pet getting hungry, eh?”

            The girl cringed back from the clawed hand that reached out to stroke her hair. “I can’t feel my foot any more,” she said hoarsely. “Please…if you could take the cuff off, just for a few hours…” she begged. Dirty, tangled, matted blonde hair fell around her face in thick hanks, and her blue eyes were dull and listless.

            He smirked. “If I did that, babe, you’d just try to escape again,” he laughed. “I’ll see if I can’t find a bigger cuff while I’m out. If I have time while I’m working.”

            She dragged the thin, dirty blanket up over her slender shoulders; the blood from the fresh clawmarks—which overlapped the scars of so many, many older ones—soaked into the thin cotton of the blanket. She curled up on the mattress under the blanket, curling into a fetal position, shivering against the chill. Like any cave, the subcellar—plain concrete floor, walls, and ceiling—stayed at a perpetual 50*F.

            Victor Creed dressed and headed up the ladder, pushing open the hatch overhead, and then went up the cellar steps to fetch two gallon jugs of water and a loaf of bread, carrying them back down to her. He tugged the blanket back and snickered as she wrapped her arms around herself further; she whimpered as he reached out to draw one talon down along the soft flesh of her shoulder and upper arm, carving the skin open like the flesh of a Thanksgiving turkey. Blood rilled up from the new gash and dripped down her arm. “So damn temptin’, babe,” he growled. “I almost feel like another go, but…eh, they really want this dude dead, an’ they’re offering too damn much to put it off.” He reached down and fisted his hand in her hair, yanking her up to her feet, then higher, her feet dangling in mid-air as his mouth came down on hers, kissing her ferociously. Blood seeped from around the seal of their lips as his fangs sliced her lips.

            He dropped her abruptly. “Behave while I’m gone, babe.” His eyes lingered for a moment on the metal collar still latched around her throat, red and green lights blinking, and then he turned away and headed up and out of the cabin.

 

 

**Sunday, May 8, 1983**

 

            Lauren sat hunched on her mattress, not leaning back against the cool wall; the clawmarks in her back and sides had started to heal, but pressing them against anything harder than the mattress would have broken the scabs open and started them bleeding again. She looked around the room numbly. Her captor had said he’d be gone ‘a few days’, and had left enough food and water for two days. But he had been gone four.

            She looked over at the two jugs he had left. One was still full; the other had only a third of a gallon left in it. She swallowed hard. _If he got caught…no one will ever know to come and find me. I’ll die here. NO! He can’t have been…can’t have been…he’s too strong._ Every inch of her body ached with the wordless evidence of his strength, mute scrimshaw carvings on formerly pristine flesh, every inch a testament to where those talons had dug in while gripping her in the throes of his passion. Not love, never that—there was no mistaking what he did to her for that. He had waited less than a full day after she had woken there to take her virginity, ripping her open like a battering ram while she screamed and sobbed underneath him, bleeding onto the mattress in more place than one by the time he had finished.

            He had made her pregnant once, two years after abducting her, when she was fifteen. When her scent had changed enough for him to smell her condition, to understand what had happened, he had waited until she was five months along—far enough along for the child within her to be more than a tiny clump of cells—big enough to touch.

            And then he had held her down on the mattress with one hand and pushed his other hand inside her, tearing open her cervix with a talon, puncturing the placenta with one claw so that the waters gushed out and the babe died, delivered dead over twenty-four hours later as her weakened, cramping frame pushed it out into the world it would never know.

            She had nearly died of the fever brought on by infection by his dirty hands ripping the flesh inside her, until he had taken the collar off for a scant few hours. The fever had broken almost instantly, the wounds of the past few weeks healing bit by bit. Before they were quite fully healed, he had put the collar back on her, holding her down, so much stronger than her, and raped her again.

            In the quietest moments, when he was gone for a day or three on his missions, she would talk to herself. Enough time had passed for her to understand what had happened.

            “I’m a mutant,” she whispered into the chill subcellar air. “I heal, and I have some sort of mind powers. And I’m a murderer. All those people back home are dead because of me. Because of what my powers did.”

            Her stomach growled furiously. She cast a longing glance at the loaf of bread he had left her. Half the slices were gone. She knew she had to cut back on how fast she was eating them, make them last as long as she could, and the same for the water.

            There was a round hole in the floor, opposite the ladder that led up to the basement, at the farthest reach of her chain; it led down into an underground cavern, and that was where she passed her waste. But perhaps…perhaps it might be better, when that last third of a gallon of water was gone and the jug was empty, to use the jug to hold her urine.

            Just in case.

 

 

**Wednesday, May 11, 1983**

 

            “Creed, where are you?” she whispered. “Come…come back.” She bit back the words ‘to me’; it sounded too much like a bad soap opera, and the thing that was between them—slave and master and unimaginable violence—was nothing of the sort.

            The second jug of water was only three-quarters full. The other jug was half full, although not with water. She had not yet been able to make herself drink from it, but given the only things she had to eat and drink, it was clear, unclouded, and held no foul smell. Her stomach churned at the thought of drinking it, but she knew if things got bad enough, she would do what she had to in order to survive.

            “A week.” He had never been gone so long before. There was no chance he had forgotten about her—he was too obsessive, too _possessive_ , for that…but captured? Or killed? Those were possible.

            There were seven slices of bread left, a little withered, the end pieces drying out and getting hard. But there was no mold on any of them. She was parceling them out a slice per day now, and when she got down to the last four, she would ration them further, a half slice per day. After that, there would be nothing left; the walls were too sound, the seal on the overhead hatch too strong, for rats or spiders or snakes or any sort of creeping, scuttling insects to make their way down there. As much as the thought turned her stomach, she knew that, if it was long enough before Creed returned, she would welcome centipedes or crickets or spiders to munch on.

            With a moan, she dragged herself across the room to peer up the ladder. Her legs were no longer strong enough to support her. She could hear no sounds from above, no feet stomping, nothing to indicate he might have returned. She lowered her head down onto the cold floor to rest before dragging herself back to her mattress.

            _I…won’t last much longer._ He had been very careful to leave nothing of use in the room she could use to break or remove her collar. The water jugs were thin plastic; he had removed all the steel springs and framework from the mattress. There was nothing to start a fire with to even warm the chill subcellar.

            “Come back, Creed,” she whispered at last. “Before it’s too late.”

 

 

**Saturday, May 14, 1983**

 

            A half-slice of bread from now on, for eight more days. And there was only a day’s worth of actual water left; after that, she would have to start drinking what she had made from the water.

            Every ounce of spare flesh on her frame was slowly melting away: breasts, buttocks, the soft curves of hips and thighs. She could count her ribs now without trying, feel the bony knobs in her clavicles and knees and wrists. She had thought to bring the water jugs closer to her, because now dragging herself across the room to where Creed had left them was something she no longer had the strength for. Nor could she drag herself across the room to the latrine pit, but it no longer mattered; she had not passed solid waste in the last two days. There was no doubt that she was not eating enough to make any.

            Lauren no longer believed Creed would return while she was still alive. Something had detained him, whether competition or prison or death. She hoped it was death; she knew there was every likelihood that she was going to die here, and if that was the case, she wanted to die knowing that he was dead, too.

            She had tried, three days ago, to break the collar around her throat by smashing it against the wall. Unfortunately, given the angle of her body, it had meant smashing her head against the wall. The repeated impacts of metal against concrete had broken a few of the small lights, but the collar still functioned. Her head raged and rang with hollow, smacking sounds, and screamed in pain from the blows. Blood had crusted against the side of her head, further matting her hair. On Creed’s good days, he had brought her upstairs, unchained, to bathe in the bathtub on the cabin’s main floor, and she remembered the hot water and pungent-smelling soap from those rare occasions with an almost gluttonous misery now. Her stomach no longer cramped with hunger, but her thirst still raged, and she knew that, if given the chance, she would drink her old bath water, soap and all, just to quench the fire in her throat.

            Her bony fingers shook as she reached out to tear a piece of bread into ragged halves, and then put one half back in the wrinkled plastic wrapper before eating the other half in small, lingering bites, making it last as long as possible. The cheap white bread offered nothing in the way of flavor, and very little in nutrients, but she ate it. She imagined that, when the last slice was gone, she would lick the taste of old bread off the inside of the wrapper and then eat the plastic itself in small shreds, anything to fill her stomach.

            She lay back down on the mattress, tipping over, and closed her eyes. Most of her time the last few days had been spent in sleep. With the ache in her belly gone, she thought that falling asleep and dying with her eyes closed might not be the worst way to go.

            At the very least, it would reunite her with her parents. Creed had brought out the paperwork he had stolen from her father’s safe one day, showing the documents to her. Telling her that she had been adopted had been meant to break her, she suspected, but it did the exact opposite. Knowing that someone loved her enough to make her their child and bring her into their home, even though she wasn’t born of them, left her with a wave of warmth that lasted until she saw the dried, darkened blood on the old papers.

            Creed had laughed as he told her how he had gutted her parents, tearing out her mother’s throat with his fangs, thrusting his taloned hand all the way through her father’s chest and tearing out his heart.

            _That_ had been the thing that had broken her.

            She had no longer fought him after that. One day, she expected, he would grow tire of her, and kill her, and find a new playtoy. Nothing would save her from that.

            She hoped it would be sooner rather than later.

 

**Wednesday, May 18, 1983**

 

            The flesh was rotting off her foot.

            Everything below the manacle had turned black, and chunks of stinking, liquefied skin and muscle were peeling away from the bones. The lack of circulation from the too-tight cuff had finally done its job.

            The bread was gone, and the water…and drinking her own urine had made her sick, made her vomit it back up again and then lay panting and flushed and sweating on the bed, too weak to move.

            “I guess this is it,” she whispered, her voice a sandpaper rasp in the cold air.

            She closed her eyes and waited to die.

 

**Friday, May 20, 1983**

 

            “—and stay down!”

            Logan’s claws carved deep even as Jean lashed out with her thoughts, blasting into Sabretooth’s mind, shutting him down like a child turning off the TV. The huge, feral mutant dropped in his mad scramble up the Montana mountain road; he had abandoned his truck a quarter-mile back after Scott’s eye-beams had demolished it, and gone racing desperately up the mountainside toward a small cabin on a nearby plateau.

            “He’s down!” Hank roared out, and he, Scott, Ororo, Jean, Pietro, Mystique, and Kurt leapt, pummeling Creed with multiple blows and blasts, until the fanged monster lay unmoving on the gravel road, one arm outstretched toward the cabin.

            Logan glanced down at his foe and then up toward the cabin. “We ain’t seen hide nor hair o’ Creed since—”

            “Since the abduction of that girl from the school back in ’78,” Jean said quietly.

            “He was tryin’ ta make it ta the cabin,” Logan answered with a nod. “Get him in the jet. Chuck can decide what ta do with him. I’m headin’ up there ta…see what I can find.” He grimaced.

            “Logan,” Jean called, and her voice was heavy with sorrow. “I don’t sense…any thoughts up there. Nothing living.”

            He sighed, his shoulders slumping. “No, I didn’t expect ya to, Jeannie,” he said. “But I gotta look.” He turned and started hiking up the mountainside.

            Scott looked at Jean. “I’ll call the Professor,” he said. “He’ll be glad, at least, to learn that we caught this bastard at last. We’ve been chasing him for days.”

            “It’s hard to keep hold of Creed’s mind,” Jean murmured. “It’s little more than that of an animal.” She looked down at the unconscious mutant grimly. “Even when he’s unconscious, like now, I—” Her eyes went wide and she clapped a hand over her mouth, then spun abruptly and staggered away a few steps to vomit into the snow.

            “Jean?” Scott cried out, alarmed, rushing to her side. “Jean, what’s wrong?”

            She turned to him, her eyes full of tears. “Oh, god, Scott,” she whispered. “I can see it in his thoughts. The girl.” She swallowed hard. “He’s been…using her. For his…needs.”

            Scott’s lips tightened in a hard, thin line even as he paled. “That’s monstrous,” he hissed.

            “She was still alive as recently as when he left here on the assassination assignment we caught him at,” she said. “He left her chained up in a secret chamber below the basement…with enough food and water for two days.”

            “We’ve…we’ve been chasing him for much longer than that,” Hank said from off to the side of the jet, sounding strangled and sick.

            “May the blessed Lord take the poor child into his arms,” Kurt prayed quietly.

            Hank turned to finishing up shackling Sabretooth and fitting a neural-damping collar around Creed’s throat. Then he hoisted him up on his brawny shoulders and carried him into the belly of the Blackbird.

 

 

 

            Logan stepped into the front room of the small cabin and listened. Not a sound disturbed the stillness inside the house, not so much as the scratching of a mouse. Creed’s stench lay thickly over the room, but there was…something else.

            _~Logan.~_ Jean’s voice resonated inside his head. _~I’ve scanned Creed’s thoughts. The girl was still alive as of when he left. He was keeping her in a subcellar. Go down to the basement; the hatch to the subcellar is hidden underneath an old refrigerator. But…he’s been gone almost three weeks. He only left her two days’ worth of food and water, because he expected to be back that soon.~_ The sorrow in her tone was palpable.

            He swore and hurried through the cabin, finding the doorway that led down to the basement in the kitchen. He flicked on the lights and descended quickly.

            The odors were stronger down here, a trace of the girl’s scent, no doubt escaping the subcellar every time Creed came and went, and a stronger stink, the smell of rot.

            The smell of a corpse.

“Aw, fuck,” he muttered under his breath. “All right, girl. I’m sorry we ain’t in time. But I ain’t gonna leave you here like his garbage.”

He marched over to the refrigerator and shoved it out of the way, leaving the hatch exposed. His glance flicked sideways and he frowned as he spotted a blood-stained certificate laying on the tool bench. Logan picked it up, his gaze flicking back and forth the old paper—an adoption certificate for the girl that Creed had abducted. _…the hell? Why would he take this?_ He shoved the paper into a pocket in his uniform and yanked the hatch up.

The stench of rot roiled out of the open hatchway, hitting him in the face hard enough to make him gag. There was no sound below, not the faintest trace of a heartbeat, and he groaned, even as he dropped down the twelve feet to the floor below.

A small form lay crumpled on a filthy mattress on the far side of the room, covered with a blue blanket. An empty plastic gallon jug, and another that was half-full of what was clearly urine by the smell, sat next to the mattress, as did a few small scraps of clear and colored plastic—some sort of food wrapper.

He approached the mattress with heavy steps and crouched down next to it, drawing the blanket back. The naked young woman who lay there was emaciated as badly as any death camp victim, her skin greyish and cold. There was a manacle around her ankle, leading to a chain in the wall; everything below the manacle was gone, a slime of putrescence on the mattress and blanket, and a few bones held together by rotting tendons. “Oh, darlin’,” Logan groaned, his voice breaking. Carefully, he extended a single claw, sliding it under the cuff and then cutting up through the steel. He peeled it off her in chunks, then turned to cut the power-neutralizing collar from around her neck as well.

It was impossible not to see the scars that covered her body as he wrapped the corpse up in the blanket, long runnels from Creed’s claws, raked across her hips and back where he had grabbed her, clawing at her in his brutal need. The newest ones were still mostly scabs, criss-crossing over older ones in varying stages of healing. The oldest had to be years old, dating back to when Creed had first abducted her as a 13-year-old. “You…bastard,” he breathed, feeling rage sweep through him, hot and fierce, almost uncontrollable. There was a taste of iron, lingering on his tongue, and he fought with the beast inside him, smashing it back down, wrestling it under control, and finally, he took a deep breath.

The breath brought the girl’s scent to him, the last clean and pure bit, deep under the stink of rot, and his eyes went wide as he finally recognized it. “Oh, fuck,” he croaked. “Jeanie.”

~ _I’m here, Logan. What is it?~_ Jean’s voice rang out in his thoughts.

He organized his thoughts, focusing. _Found an adoption certificate upstairs, for the girl. Creed stole it from her home when he killed her parents. Her scent…it’s just like Chuck’s. Pretty sure he was the girl’s real dad. She’s about the right age._

He felt the wave of shock roll from her, and with a sigh, he wrapped the girl up in the blanket, tucking it in around her at all ends, and then picked her up, carrying her to the ladder underneath the hatchway. “I can’t carry her up th’ ladder, Jean,” he growled. “Lift me up.”

He felt her telekinesis seize him, floating him up through the air and setting him down on the ground a few feet from the hole. With a sinking feeling, he carried the girl up the stairs from the basement, and then through the cabin, out the front door, and back down the hill to where the Blackbird was parked.

 


	3. Echoes of Mortality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And then the dead rise.

_“Forgiveness is giving up the hope_

_that the past could have been any different.”_

_\--Oprah Winfrey_

 

 

**Montana**

**A small cabin in the mountains**

**Friday, May 20, 1983**

            “Dear god,” Hank choked as Logan approached, carrying what looked like far too small a bundle for an 18-year-old girl. Then the stench of rot rolled through the clearing around the Blackbird in a gagging wave, and Jean clamped a hand over her mouth. The shiny, sticky knob of white bone poked out from where the edge of the blanket had worked loose.

            “What—” Scott stammered.

            “Bastard had her chained up in a dungeon under his basement. Cuff around her ankle was too tight,” Logan said gruffly, visibly working at controlling his rage. “Cut off circulation. Her foot…ended up rotting off.”

            Kurt looked like he wanted to throw up. “The poor _fraulein_ …” he whispered.

            Logan looked at Jean. “Did you…get in touch with Chuck, tell him…”

            She shook her head. “I couldn’t,” she said faintly. “Not yet. He’s always felt bad we were never able to find her—”

            “Creed had one’a Stryker’s power-damping collars on her,” Logan cut in. “Not only would it have kept her from usin’ her powers, she wouldn’t even’a registered as a mutant to Cerebro.”

            “—but to learn… _that_ ,” she finished softly, wrapping her arms around herself, shaking her head.

            “To learn what?” Scott asked.

            Logan looked up at him. “Girl was adopted. The couple back in the town that Creed killed, they were her adopted parents,” he said roughly. “Her scent…it smells like the Professor’s. Can’t tell for sure without a DNA test, but…pretty sure he’s her father.”

            Ororo’s eyes went wide, and Hank flinched. “That…that’s going to all but kill him,” Hank said hoarsely.

            “Then we don’t tell him,” Raven said, shaking her head. “Not yet. We can’t.”

            “We can’t keep it from him!” Jean protested. “Even though he doesn’t go poking in our heads at random—it’s wrong.”

            “I’m not saying we don’t tell him forever,” Raven insisted. “But…give it a day or two to for the shock of her death to wear off. You know how Charles gets. He takes the responsibility for everything onto his own shoulders. The disaster in Wisconsin, all those dead—he thinks the first manifestation of her powers was all but explosive—like when oil wells flare off deposits of natural gas that have built up in the underground pockets where they find oil. He blames himself for that, even though there’s no way he could have known. He blamed himself that the girl was abducted, and that he figured she died. Learning she was his daughter is going to make it a million times worse, and we can’t afford that.”

            Looks went around the circle, and finally, Jean nodded. “A day or two. Just that,” she sighed. “He’s gonna figure it out on his own, though. I won’t be able to look him in the eyes.”

            Hank had stepped halfway up the Blackbird stairs. “Come on, Logan, we can put it into one of the baggage areas,” he said.

            Logan scowled. “Not an ‘it’, bub. She. And she’s not luggage. I’ll carry her myself,” he growled.

            Scott opened his mouth to say something about the smell and then closed it quickly. Hank flushed. “Right,” he said. “I, uh, I’m going to start the plane. We should get going.”

            One by one, they boarded the plane, taking their accustomed places. It had started to rain outside, and Logan stood there for a moment, the small, light, blanket-wrapped bundle in his arm more of a weight than he could remember having carried for a long time. Raindrops pattered across the sky-blue blanket and soaked in, darkening the fabric and washing away some of the reek of decay. He tilted his face up to the sky as the rain ran over his face and hair, the coolness settling into his clothes.

            _~Logan, come on,~_ Jean’s voice reached out lightly to his mind, not intruding on his memories. ~ _There are other houses up this side of the mountain. Sooner or later, someone else will come along the road. We can’t still be here when that happens.~_

            He stifled a surge of irritation at the interruption, for just a moment annoyed with the lovely red-haired telepath, and then looked down at the bundle in his arms with a wave of overwhelming sorrow. “I’m sorry, kid,” he said roughly. “You never even got a chance ta figure out what you was gonna be when you grew up. You deserved better than this.” He cleared his throat. “I wish ta God we’d been able ta find ya five years ago. At least that bastard don’t got you anymore.” Rage simmered in his gut as he turned to carry the broken body onto the Blackbird. He thought there was a very good chance that, once they arrived back at the mansion and the girl’s body was buried, he would pay a visit to Creed in his cell…and there wouldn’t be anything left of the other mutant to hand over to authorities.

            He came up the stairs into the back of the plane, the hatchway lifting behind him to close, and made his way forward—past the berth where a drugged Creed was chained down with enough chains to anchor the Titanic—to sink into his seat with the girl’s body laid crossways across his lap, one arm supporting under the crook of her neck, the other under her knees. The rotten stump of her ankle had stopped dripping where it poked out from the blanket, even with the rain washing the skin. Logan twitched as Jean fastened his flight harness for him telekinetically, offering her an awkward nod of thanks, and then the plane lifted off.

            There was a heavy pall of silence for a good ten minutes of the flight, before Kurt finally turned to Raven and quietly asked her a question. That broke the ice, and before long, the others were all talking at a low volume, the snark and sarcasm level normally present absent this time, almost certainly due to the grim freight the plane currently carried. Logan stayed silent, his attention focused on the weight in his lap. The rain had soaked the blanket; he would normally have expected the water to intensify the smell of decomposition, but instead, it seemed to have washed it away. Although the blanket itself was still filthy, the body underneath seemed to have been cleansed by the sky’s tears. He shot a glance at Ororo, wondering if she had been responsible for the sudden downpour, but her own stare was out the window and looked far away.

            Tentatively, he brushed the area of the blanket where the girl’s head was with a light, awkward touch, almost stroking her hair like he would pet a cat. _You deserved better than this, kid,_ he thought again, his last words outside the plane repeating in his head. _Chuck’s daughter—anyone’s daughter—don’t matter who. No one deserved ta be taken by Creed, held like a slave for five years, mistreated the way he did._ He understood Creed’s appetites and dark, feral hungers all too well; they were the same ones that moved him, but Creed lacked the morals and understanding of right and wrong that he did.

            The bundle in his lap shuddered, and for a moment, he thought the plane had hit some turbulence. But at the same time, Jean wrenched around in her seat to stare at him, her eyes huge with shock, mouth dropping open in stunned surprise. “Logan, she’s—”

            Before Jean could finish the sentence, the body wrapped in the blanket convulsed, heaving upward with a scream, bursting out of the wrappings of the blanket to throw terrified arms around his shoulders. “NOT HIM NOT HIM NOT HIM NOT HIM—” The wail came out at the same volume as a runaway train’s engine, painfully deafening, and everyone else in the plane twisted to stare, gasping at the child’s sudden resurrection.

            The shock turned quickly to horror as they got a look at her. The blanket was still wrapped around her hips and legs, but the bare back revealed to them as she clung to Logan like a life raft was mangled beyond recognition. Those thin, raking scars covered every inch of her shoulders and back, clawed into her like the marks of a butcher’s knife, crossing over and over and over each other, newer thick red lines overlapping thinner pale ones, until there was not a single centimeter of unmarked skin visible anywhere. It was a grim and gory testament to how many times he had forced her, ripping open her skin in his lusts, and how she had survived even a single such encounter—much less so many—was a mystery.

            There was a gagging sound as Kurt fought to keep his stomach from emptying, and the blazing, enraged look on Raven’s face promised death and damnation for Creed. Jean had gone pale, Storm looked horrified, and Scott seemed bewildered, unable to understand her sudden return to life, even as he stared at the evidence of how much injury she had already survived before her ‘death’.

            It took everything Logan had not to put the girl down, go back to the place where Creed lay bound, and dismember him, but instead, he called on what willpower he had and gently stroked the girl’s hair, whispering to her in a calm and even tone that was a million miles away from his true emotions. “Not him,” he reassured her. “I ain’t him, kid. He ain’t ever gonna touch you again. I promise.”

            She clung to him, weeping, shaking, and he managed not to cringe at the feel of the xylophone state of her frame, every bone jutting out from under a parchment-fragile covering of skin. “Someone get inta th’ supply locker behind me an’ get me out some food for her,” he grunted. His mind boiled furiously with the ‘how’ of her return; she would have died from dehydration rather than starvation, so the rain—soaking into her skin—might have revived her from a state of hibernation so deep it seemed like death, especially with the stink of rot clinging to her from her missing foot. He spared a glance down to the stump and blinked; fresh pink flesh was jutting out from the stump, slowly growing. “She’s got a healin’ factor like mine. An’ Creed’s,” he muttered, and Jean nodded, getting to her feet, opening the refrigerated supply locker and coming back with a banana, a fresh peach, a container of strawberry yogurt, and a carton of milk.

            Gingerly, he pried the girl’s fingers from their lock-hold around his shoulders and she slumped back across his lap, panting, eyes dazed. “Open yer mouth, darlin’,” he coaxed her, crushing the peach in his fist, pulping its flesh and prying it off in small chunks. She would not have the strength to chew on her own, but the sweet smell of the fruit enticed her to open her mouth, and he fed it to her in little pieces. Then the banana, then held her into a half-sitting position to drink the milk before Jean handed him a spoon so he could start feeding the girl the yogurt.

            The microwave in back dinged, and Jean came back to him with a bowl of oatmeal; the scent of brown sugar and maple syrup filled the cabin, and he fed it to the girl a spoonful at a time. She gobbled up everything he fed her with a manic desperation, and even as he watched, her flesh began to fill back out. The rain had washed most of the grime from the cellar from her skin, and with some food in her stomach, her strength had started to return. She tugged the blanket around her more closely, hiding her nakedness, her gaze darting from Logan to the others in the plane. She whimpered at the presence of so many strangers, cringing closer into the shelter of Logan’s comforting presence.

            Jean stepped close to offer Logan more food—a warmed-up bowl of premixed mashed potatoes and gravy and a bowl of grapes and cut melon and pears—and the girl’s stare darted up to her, terrified…and then she blinked.

            _~It’s all right, Lauren,~_ Jean reached out telepathically to the child, her mental voice gentle and patient. _~No one here is going to hurt you. We came to save you. He’ll never be able to hurt you again.~_

            Slowly, a tiny bit at a time, the girl’s muscles began to unclench from their terror, Jean’s telepathic words comforting her, and—

            “ ** _MINE!_** ”

            She screamed as Creed roared from the back of the plane, and the clink of metal straining against metal as he fought the chains holding him down made a poignant countermelody to her shriek of fear. Creed roared again as Logan bristled and Jean whirled.

            “ ** _Get your hands off her, Logan! Don’t touch her! She’s mine! MINE!”_** Creed growled at the top of his lungs, Logan’s scent overwriting his own against the skin of the wounded girl. Rage spiraled through his head at the thought of Logan trying to take something that belonged to him. “ ** _She would have been fine if you fuckers hadn’t kept me from her so long, you get your dirty hands off her, she’s—”_**

            Jean slammed into Creed’s brain with a psychic blast strong enough to drop a rhino in its tracks, and Creed slumped back into his birth in a tinkle of strained steel chain links, growling incoherently under his breath. Logan had wrapped his arms around the girl to keep her in place as she writhed and scrabbled weakly to run. There was nowhere to go on the plane, not that she knew that, but the food had definitely helped her healing; she was much stronger now, and he had to be careful restraining her.

            “He’s out again,” Jean said. “Won’t last long. I’ll go sedate him again.” She gave Logan a bleak look. “It’s a shame we don’t have one of those collars for _him_.”

            “Just kill him,” Raven said darkly. “After everything he’s done for so many years, he’s not worth trying to save.”

            Logan struggled to hold onto the girl without hurting her; she was straining against his grasp so fiercely that he was afraid she would bruise herself against the metal bonded to his bones. “It’s okay,” he whispered into her ears, stroking her hair soothingly. “It’s okay. He can’t get you. He can’t touch you.” She made sounds like a terrified animal, and he thought angrily that the only reason she probably hasn’t pissed herself at Creed’s screams was because the fluids she had drank hadn’t had time to make it through her system to her bladder yet.

            She was sobbing, dry-crying, no tears to weep yet, but eventually, her strength and energy ran out and she slumped into his arms, hiding her face against his chest, shivering all over. The grey hue of her skin from when he had thought her dead had been replaced by a rose-tinged ivory, gone sickly white as chalk in her fear. He could smell the terror in her blood, and realized she was every bit as traumatized as he had been when he had first escaped from Stryker’s program. _PTSD_ _fer sure,_ he thought, and just kept petting her, without words, without anger, until at last her breathing slowed and she relaxed even further into the depths of sleep. Her missing foot was regenerating—there was half a foot now, with the nubbins of toes beginning to emerge from the far end of it—and the most recent clawmarks on her, those that had been scabs but not healed, had disappeared, not even leaving scars behind to mark where they had been.

            “Her healin’ factor’s th’ equal o’ mine, I think,” he said gruffly to Jean. “An’ she’s clearly got that telepath thing Chuck has goin’. Weird mix o’ talents.”

            Raven flushed. “One of Charles’ favorite practices when he was younger was to hit on women with minor differences, like different-colored eyes. Things like that are mutations, too…just not like ours. I wonder if whichever woman was this girl’s birth mother had not just different colored eyes, but powers, too? A healing factor, maybe?”

            Jean nodded. “It’s possible. She could have inherited gifts from both parents. We’re not likely to ever know for sure unless we can figure out who her mother was,” she said.

            Scott raised his voice a bit. “Hank, how close are we?”

            “Ten minutes, Scott,” Hank responded. “I’m just getting ready to notify the Professor we’re almost back.”

            “Jean. There’s clean blankets in one of the storage lockers behind the seats. Can you get one for her, please?” Logan rasped. “This rag is filthy.” His nose told the tale of the various stains across the ragged piece of cloth—spilled food, blood, urine, semen, tears. It made his hands itch to touch it, and he didn’t want it touching the girl— _Lauren_ —for another moment. He murmured thanks as Jean fetched a clean grey medical blanket, and managed to get it wrapped around the girl and the old one tossed to the floor without exposing her nakedness.

            The plane descended toward the basketball court, which opened up, splitting in two so the plane could come to rest in the landing bay underground. Hank finished shutting the engines down, and then one by one, they rose from their seats, Logan carrying the girl in his arms.

            “How’re we going to get Creed out of here to his cell?” Scott asked, frowning.

            “I could take him,” Kurt offered. “I haff seen those cells many times. I only worry about him vaking back up.”

            “Shoot him full of so much sedatives it’d kill a normal person,” Raven said with a steely tone. “And leave the chains on. I don’t personally care if he shits his pants. He is not getting loose among all these students.”

            Hank nodded. “Let me get to the cell control room, first,” he said. “Kurt, you can take me there and then pop back here to get Creed. I want to be ready to get those forcefields online the moment you teleport back out of the cell and leave Creed in there.”

            “Sounds like a plan,” Ororo said calmly.

            Jean nodded. “I’m monitoring his mind,” she said. “He’s still under, for now. I’ll prep the sedatives and make sure he stays that way.” She went to the med-cabinet to prepare a new syringe.

            The others gathered around, and reluctantly, Logan beckoned Hank over. “Hold her,” he said gruffly. “I ain’t takin’ the chance he’s fakin’ out Jeannie. I need ta stand there while she drugs him. If he tries anythin’, I’m puttin’ him down.”

            Hank took the young woman from him gingerly, cradling her in massive, blue-furred arms, and Logan stepped forward to stand guard over Jean as she finished prepping the syringe and bent down to inject the sedatives into the vein in Creed’s neck. Lauren began to twitch and moan softly as Hank held her, but it was over quickly enough; Jean finished the process and discarded the syringe, and Logan stepped back to take the young woman into his arms again. Her unconscious unease subsided as he took her back.

            “I’m ready, Kurt,” Hank said, stepping forward, and Kurt rested a hand on Hank’s arm and the two of them vanished in a cloud of black smoke. Kurt reappeared almost instantly.

            “He said it would take him fifteen seconds to get things set up,” Kurt said. Raven nodded. They all waited, counting down the seconds, Jean monitoring Creed’s thoughts, and then Kurt laid a hand on Creed’s arm and they vanished.

            The German mutant reappeared just seconds later. “He’s still out,” Kurt said, almost breathless. “And he is locked in. Ve are safe, for ze moment.”

            Logan nodded. “I’m gonna take the girl ta one of the spare student rooms an’ sit with her ‘til she wakes up,” he said, brooking no disagreement. “Normally, I’d take her ta the nurse’s office, but with the healin’ factor, anything that’s still wrong with her, her powers are gonna fix. She seems ta trust me, sorta. As bad as she’s had it, it ain’t fair ta have her wake up surrounded by unfamiliar faces.” He met Raven’s gaze. “Tell Chuck she’s alive, but mebbe hold off on tellin’ him this is his kid. Let him make sure Creed’s not goin’ anywhere. I got no idea how long the kid’s gonna sleep, but she’s definitely gonna need more food when she wakes up. An’ clothes, an’ a shower.” He sniffed. “An’ probably a haircut. I dunno if we can get those mats out.”

            He turned and carried her out of the plane.


	4. Waking to a New Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not quite dead, after all.

_“Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability_

_to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion,_

_a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive_

_the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming_

_psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers._

_The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen_

_within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously_

_stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie_

_that is still going after the sound has been turned off._

_We cannot heal until we move fully through_

_that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.”_

_― Susan Pease Banitt,_

_The Trauma Tool Kit: Healing PTSD from the Inside Out_

 

 

**Westchester, NY**

**Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters**

**Friday, May 20, 1983**

           

            Most of the students’ bedrooms were on the second, third, and fourth floors, but there was a single room left on the main floor, tucked behind the grand central staircase, with a pair of glass French doors that led out onto the back lawn. No one had used it since the house had been rebuilt after it had been blown up, and so Logan pushed his way through the bedroom door and into it.

            A fine patina of dust lay over everything, tickling his nostrils and making him want to sneeze, but he stifled it as he carried Lauren past the dresser and the standing full-length mirror. He paused long enough to switch his hold on her to just one arm and then pulled back the covers on the bed before laying her down. The bed was a standard four-poster, queen-sized, but with no canopy overhead; everything in the room was fairly generic. It was the usual course for new students to decorate their rooms as they liked after coming to the school, but given the monstrous circumstances she had escaped from, she would have nothing.

            Logan knew the Professor would not allow things to remain that way, even before he found out he was her father.

            He drew the covers back up, to just below her throat, and then sank into the rocking chair at the side of the bed. Though she was unconscious, he wanted to reassure her, anyway. “You rest, girl,” he mumbled gruffly. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere. I’ll be here when ya wake.”

            Lauren rolled over onto one side, not waking, and curled up into a fetal position, arms wrapped around her knees, then let out a soft sigh and relaxed into the blankets. Logan watched her with a burning hatred for Creed seared into his gut like a brazier of hot coals. He bit back the litany of obscenities that wanted to come pouring out of his lips; the girl was apparently psychic, and probably had no mental shields. It would be hard enough for her to cope with the thoughts and emotions of everyone in the mansion, until Xavier taught her how to spin her own shields. He didn’t need to contribute to that by vomiting up his hatred and rage in her presence, even if she was asleep.

            Outside, it began to rain, a warm late spring/early summer rain that came hissing down onto the grass on the back lawn, audible through the French doors, and he got up and went over to open them. A warm breeze brought the rain’s scent into the room to him, carrying the smell of growing flowers, the soft green grass, and the water smell from the lake down by the boathouse, washing the world clean. The subtle breeze stirred at the thin layer of dust in the room, blowing most of it away, and he sank back down into the rocking chair.

            It took very little time before he was asleep.

 

 

* * *

 

 

            Logan woke some time later, fuzzily conscious that something had changed. The sound of rain was still coming in from outside the French doors, and the breeze was still carrying the rain smell with it, but now another scent had been added to it. He straightened up, opening his eyes to see that Lauren was missing from the bed.

            He turned toward the open door, and blinked as he saw that she was sitting out on the little step outside the doors, the blanket crumpled around her, the rain pouring down to soak her from head to toe. The water poured down over her thin, scarred shoulders from the mats of her hair, and she sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, which were tucked up in front of her. The rocking chair creaked as he sat up, and she threw a glance back over her shoulder at him, dark circles under her eyes. She was still too thin—too much of what little she had eaten on the Blackbird had gone to heal her wounds—and her foot had not finished regenerating.

            “Hey, kid,” he said quietly, carefully.

            Like a skittish animal, she eyed him for a moment, and then turned back to look out at the weeping midnight sky. “You don’t want to hurt me,” she finally said. Her voice was soft, barely more than a whisper, but sounded certain enough. “I looked. In your head.”

            The muscles in his jaw tightened, and he felt a momentary spike of anger, but shoved it back down hard. “You know how ta do that already?” he asked warily.

            “I don’t know how _not_ to do it,” she said quietly. “I don’t know how to shut everyone out. So many voices.” She clutched her knees tighter, shrinking against herself. “It’s so loud. Back at…back there—” she swallowed hard, and he could see her remembering her captivity with Creed, “—it was quiet all the time. Nobody around except my owner, and the collar on, and…” Her words drifted away like flower petals on the surface of a river.

            “He ain’t yer owner,” Logan said, possibly a little more harshly than he meant to. He saw her flinch and winced at his own lack of control. “He don’t…nobody owns you, kid. You’re free.”

            She looked back at him, and there was such despair in her gaze that it felt like a punch in the gut. “Free? What’s that? My family is dead. I have nothing, not even clothes on my back. I have no idea where I am, or who any of you are.”

            He grimaced. “My name is Logan,” he said, getting up slowly from the rocking chair, expecting her to jump or flinch or run.

            But she remained where she was sitting, even when he stepped forward a step, then another. He marveled at her courage, after all she had been through.

            It was only when he got close enough to sit down on the step next to her, and looked more closely, that he realized there was no bravery involved, only despair. The expression in her gaze was one of resignation—the understanding, after so many years of rape and torture, that she was powerless, that there was nothing she could do to prevent the world from hurting her, that all she could expect from life was pain and eventually, death.

            “Oh, kid,” he sighed. She did not pull away when he slid an arm around her skinny shoulders and pulled her into the warmth that was the curve of his frame. “You, uh…ya know ya were adopted?” he asked hesitantly.

            She nodded, and despite the fact that the spring rain was warm, she must have been cold, because she burrowed into the hug. “He showed me the papers he stole,” she husked, her voice hoarse with loss and memory.

            “This place…it’s a school fer kids like you. Kids with powers, special kids. An’ the guy who runs it is yer birth dad,” he said awkwardly. He felt, without looking down at her, the twitch of her head as she glanced upward at him. She was still as naked as the moment he had pulled her out of Creed’s subcellar, and he was more than a little sure that Scott or Ororo or any of the others who came in just now would misunderstand what was happening here. He didn’t shy away from looking at her, but there was nothing sexual whatsoever about it; the contact between them was more akin to doctors, working with seriously injured patients. It was necessary for a patient to be naked to put in stitches, to perform surgery, to set broken ribs. Her injuries were mostly emotional, now—aside from the incompletely-regenerated foot, her scars were all healed—and those, of course, would take much, much longer to heal.

            If they ever did.

            She leaned against him. “Can I…can I have some food?” she asked, her tone strung through with nerves.

            “Kid, ya can have anythin’ ya want,” he promised her.

            “A bath?” she asked. He nodded, and she hesitated for a moment, as if she wasn’t sure how far to push her luck. “Some clothes?”

            “Of course,” he said. “I dunno if we got regular clothes that’ll fit ya just now, but pretty sure I can go grab a uniform in yer size fer after ya get outta the bath, and when yer feelin’ up ta it, I think Jeannie an’ ‘Roro an’ yer dad could take ya clothes shoppin’.”

            “Jeannie…and Roro?” she asked.

            “Jeannie is the redhead ya saw on the plane,” he said. “Jean Grey. An’ Roro is th’ other lady from the plane, with the white hair.”

            “And the blue lady?” she asked quietly.

            “That’s Raven,” he said. “She’s th’ ‘dopted sister of yer dad. She’d probably go with ya, too.”

            She looked thoughtful. “Would you go with me?” she asked curiously.

            He peered down at her, face scrunched. “Uh…why would ya want _me_ goin’ with ya?” he asked, frowning.

            The look in her eyes as she tipped her face up toward him was heartbreaking. “I told you already,” she said simply. “I looked in your head. You don’t want to hurt me.”

            He could barely stand to breathe any more. “I’m gonna start the bath fer ya,” he said. “You get in, get clean. I’ll bring food an’ a uniform fer ya. Can ya do that?” he asked hoarsely.

            She nodded, leaning back and drawing the blanket up around her. It was absolutely soaked, a sodden, dripping weight of chilly water, and he held up a hand, getting to his feet before taking it from her and squeezing as much water out of it as possible. Rain ran out of it down his hands, trickling down the couple of steps from her doors into the back lawn, and she got to her feet as he held it out and stepped under it, wrapping it around her. “I’ll bring some dry blankets, too.”

            “Thank you,” she said quietly, and she turned and went back inside, into the bathroom, and shut the door behind her. A moment later, he heard the water in the bathtub turn on. The new student bathrooms were stocked with all the standard things students needed—towels, shampoo and soap, new toothbrushes and toothpaste, bathroom paper, lotion and so on. He waited a moment longer, then headed out of her room.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

            Lauren ran the hot water only, watching the steam raise into the air. Her skin itched now, after sitting in the rain for well over an hour; it had never itched before she’d had a chance to rinse some of the filth off, and she wondered if she had just gotten used to it, or if the successive layer after layer of dirt, grime, and her captor’s body fluids had formed a kind of shell that weighed her skin down and kept it from feeling anything at all.

            There were fluffy white towels here, and bright green soap that smelled sharp—Irish Spring, she thought—and a toothpaste still in its cardboard box, a plastic drinking glass in clear plastic wrap like those at hotels. A bottle of shampoo had been found in the linen closet, and a fresh tube of toothpaste.

            These were all things she had never had while Creed held her captive. The five or six teeth that had been hurting, probably from terrible cavities, had slowly stopped hurting since she woke, and she had peered in the mirror over the sink after coming into the bathroom, hooking a finger into her mouth to yank her jaws down. The dark spots she had been sure she would find on those pained teeth were nowhere to be found.

            There was a bath-mat on the floor at the side of the old-fashioned clawfoot bathtub. She stood on it and carefully lifted a foot up and over the side of the tub, stepping into the water. Pain ran up her leg in a scarlet wave as the hot water seared her skin dark pink, and she hissed. She finished climbing in, gritting her teeth against the heat. The thought of all the people her brain had inadvertently killed when her powers had first manifested—all the adults in the school, all the closest adults in town outside of the school—was weighing heavily on her mind. She had found the death total in Logan’s mind on her perusal while he slept: over 200 people, many of them someone she had known, including all her favorite teachers.

            How did that make her any better than Creed? She sat down in the water, whimpering as it came up to mid-chest, leaving her skin scarlet and blazing with pain. It was the only way she could make herself pay, even a little, for what her brain had done.

            As the hot water soaked into her skin, it dissolved the coating of grime she was wearing, and bit by bit, as the water cooled over the minutes that ticked away, the water darkened. She pulled the plug and let the water drain away, her skin going from dark rose back to its normal color as her healing factor kicked in and the pain faded. When the dirty water was gone, she got to her feet and used the detachable showerhead on its hose to rinse the tub out, then put it back before filling the tub full of clean, hot water again. She grabbed a washcloth out of the small niche behind the tub, unwrapped the bar of soap, and began to scrub.

            Washing her hair was much harder. The first four washes removed most of the worked-in filth and oil from almost five years of captivity, but the hair itself still remained mostly matted and tangled, and she despaired of getting it straight again. _I could just hack it all off, down to the scalp, and wait for it to grow back,_ she mused.

            She drained the water again, rinsing away the dirty film of water that clung to the sides of the tub with the showerhead, then filled it again, this time with water that was only warm rather than scalding. She sank back into the water until it reached her chin, letting the heat soak into her muscles and bones. After being in the cold cellar for so long, she wasn’t sure she would ever be warm again, just as she had been sure she would never be clean again. The thought of going back into that subcellar—or any underground place like it—made her heartbeat speed up, and sent a fine film of clammy sweat over every inch of her body. The room had never had lights, except when Creed came down to assault her; he had always brought a battery-powered camping lantern, so he could see her.

            The room Logan had picked for her was perfect; the French doors with their open access to the yard and the open sky above, both at day and night, were soothing. The smell of the rain tonight, the sweet scent of the grass and the flowers, they had calmed her, pulling her out of a panic attack when she had woken, nearly screaming, in a strange room with a strange man sleeping in the chair next to the bed she had found herself in.

            And then had come the deluge of voices.

            Most people, she thought, might find the chaotic rabble terrifying; after half a decade locked in a prison where the only voices she ever heard were her own and her captor’s, it was rather reassuring, and reminded her more than a little of being back in school. She could remember the crowded hallways between class, with everyone talking all at once, and the lunchroom, when kids were joyously shouting at friends to join them, laughing, teasing, mocking, yelling. That tumult of sound inside her head had given her back a sense of normality, even though she could not hold her hands over her ears and shut them out.

            When she had been in school, she had been a teacher’s pet, an overachiever, smart enough to study new material once and pick it up easily enough. It was a trait that could have won her the anger and jealousy of other students, but she was lucky enough to be pretty—though that prettiness had worked against her once Creed had laid eyes on her—and happy and minimally athletically inclined. She was good at track and swimming and softball—not softball, given that she was only 4’11”—and made friends easily.

            Waking up with a hundred or more voices inside her head, and Creed gone, and the realization that everything in her life had once again changed completely had run a lick of steel through her gut and spine. She had closed her eyes and focused grimly, concentrating as she always had when studying for a test, shutting out all distractions, focusing on the only thing that mattered: getting the thing in her head under control.

            And it had worked. After awhile, the voices had muted to a soft susurrus of whispers at the back of her head that was easy enough to ignore, and she had climbed quietly out of bed, wrapping the blanket around her, and gone outside to sit in the rain and weep for her freedom.

            What was harder to control, much harder, was the other phenomena she was experiencing. It was a little like a soft voice whispering in her head paired with hallucinations. Everywhere she looked, each item she looked at, she could see that place or item’s history. She could see the tree out on the back lawn, a ragged stump divided down the middle by some sort of energy weapon, only a small fragment still struggling to grow. The tree itself seemed to whisper to her, that it had been planted by the grandfather of the estate’s current owner when the owner was only five years old; that the child had used to swing from the branches of the tree, and how it had been struck down by a student a few years ago—one of those who had come to rescue her from Creed.

            It was the same as everything she looked at—the ornamental lake back by the tree, this bathtub, the room. Looking at Logan had been a symphony of even more pain, betrayal, torture, and anguish than she had suffered herself, that soft whisper in his voice telling her all he had been through. She had been stunned to realize that he was over 100 years old, that he healed as she did, that he was Creed’s younger half-brother.

            Hearing that, seeing the scenes flashing before her eyes in wavery visions that were only partly clear had made her want to vomit and scream and run. But in the end, she had watched him take two bullets to the brain, made of the same metal that was bonded to his bones, watched those bullets scramble his brain and destroy his memories. And she had realized, then, that he _didn’t know._ She had not seen any knowledge of his relation to Creed when she had plundered clumsily through his memories. The bullets—‘adamantium’, their maker had called them—had done their work too well.

            Watching his history unravel before her eyes had shown her one thing: Logan might be related to Creed, but they were nothing alike. She had watched him go through Creed’s cabin, watched him find her, listened to the words he spoke over her body when he thought she was dead.

            Lauren thought it likely that most of the people who had brought her here were decent people. She was terrified beyond belief to meet her ‘father’, not knowing what he was going to be like—kind, or strict and harsh?, or the expectations he would demand of her--but she was willing to give it a chance, at least.

            But she knew without voicing it that she would follow Logan into the gates of Hell itself, if he asked.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

            The microwave dinged, and Logan opened it up, pulling out the bowl of beef stew he had reheated inside it, setting it down on the dinner tray he had made up. There were three roast beef sandwiches, a banana and a pear, a mug of hot cocoa, a bowl of mashed potatoes with gravy, and a handful of snacks—a cupcake, a small bag of potato chips, two chocolate chip cookies with a glass of cold milk, and a half-ear of corn on the cob, slathered with butter.

            Sitting on the kitchen table were a folded grey sweatshirt and pair of sweatpants, along with a pair of clean socks and underpants and bra borrowed from one of the younger female students; the socks and undergarments were still in their packaging, yet unworn, and the sweats were standard issue for gym class. They would be more comfortable than the uniform—and she could sleep in them, and tomorrow someone could take her shopping. He was hoping it was not him; he had little patience for that sort of thing.

            But if she asked him, he would go. There was no chance, none at all, that she was not suffering the same sort of PTSD that had dogged his heels for years, and if his presence made her feel safer, then he owed her that, for being unable to track Creed and rescue her years ago when Creed had first abducted her.

            “Tell me, Logan,” a familiar voice came from the kitchen doorway, more than a little slurred. “When were you and the others going to tell me that the girl that Creed abducted and raped for years was my daughter?”

            Logan stiffened and turned toward the doorway, where Xavier sat in his hoverchair, a half-empty bottle of Scotch in his lap.

            “Tomorrow,” Logan growled. “After th’ girl had time t’ get settled in so she wouldn’t be panickin’ at every shadow she saw. An’ after you had a chance ta calm down, too.”

            “Did you really think you could all hide that information from me?” Xavier spat, his eyes red and watery. It was obvious he had been crying.

            “You had enough ta deal with, with Creed,” Logan said. “We weren’t tryin’ ta hide it from ya, just give ya a day ta decompress before we sprung the news on ya.”

            Xavier sighed. “I should have been there for her, Logan,” he said wearily, pain in his tone. “How…how is she doing?”

            Logan let out his breath. “Better than most would, Chuck,” he tried to reassure Xavier. “She’s amazingly strong. She’s healin’, physically, an’ learnin’ ta use her powers already.” He paused for a moment. “I figgered I’d watch over her while she slept. She woke up without wakin’ me, an’ took a look in my head. Says she trusts me ‘cause she knows I don’t wanna hurt her.”

            Xavier winced. “That’s…that’s good,” he said weakly. “Is she awake?” He eyed the clothes and food.

            Logan nodded. “She’s takin’ a bath, gettin’ clean after he had her so long,” he said tersely. Tucked under the sweats were a clean pair of sheets to go with the dry blankets he had promised--necessary after she had slept on the old ones before bathing. Logan stifled a shudder at the thought of how much accumulated filth would have rubbed off on the bedclothes. “She’s kinda skittish, but…she asked fer food an’ clothes.”

            “Thank you for taking care of her when I could not, Logan,” Xavier said. “I suppose it would be best to give her at least a night to try to get used to things before I come meet her, no matter how much I want to rush to see her now,” he said reluctantly.

            “Prob’ly, bub,” Logan admitted. “Sorry. She’s gonna be messed up fer a long time. I gotta say, I’m impressed a kid her age could go through all that an’ come out this end without screamin’ non-stop. She’s scared an’ she’s hurtin’, I can see that, but she’s tryin’ like hell ta hold onta things an’ put herself back together.”

            Xavier nodded distantly. “You said she’s learning to use her powers already. I can _feel_ it, even from here, reaching out with her mind, trying to…to learn about us, the school. Telepathy, like mine, but something else, too. Not the healing factor—and I don’t know where she got that. I don’t know who her mother was. I’m thinking Hank may be able to take a blood sample and run a DNA rendering that will give us things like her mother’s hair color, eye color, to help narrow it down.” He flushed. “I…spent time with a very great number of attractive young women when I was at university, and after.”

            Logan quirked a smile. “We should all be so lucky, bub,” he chuckled. “Sounds like a plan, if the girl agrees. Give her th’ night ta get settled. Ya can see her in the mornin’—bring her breakfast in bed, or somethin’. Yer gonna be spendin’ a lotta time getting’ ta know yer kid.” He paused. “Ya got any others that ya know about?”

            “One,” Xavier said, and his tone was curt, a clear notice that he was not inviting Logan to ask any more questions about that subject matter.

            “Gotcha,” Logan said. He tucked the sheets and sweats under his arm, pinning them to his side, and then lifted the dinner tray in both hands. “I’m gonna take this ta yer little girl now, Chuck, an’ make sure she eats and can get comfortable. She’s gonna need clothes beyond these sweats, my idea was ta have Raven an’ Jeannie an’ Roro take her shoppin’ tomorrow. More’n clothes, she needs some semblance of gettin’ back ta a normal life, if she can. Stuff ta decorate her room, books, posters, a new computer, maybe a stereo or TV in her room. All th’ stuff all th’ other students get from their parents when they first come here. You’re her father. That’s on you.”

            “She shall want for nothing, Logan, I promise you that,” Xavier said, and his inebriation seemed to be wearing off. “I did not know she existed, but now that I do…” his voice thickened with emotion, “I am going to do everything I can to be the father she needs.”

            Logan nodded. “Good,” he said, and headed out of the kitchen.


	5. Never a Reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lauren wakes.

_“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped._

_Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers._

_Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter_

_childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”_

_― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven_

 

 

**Westchester, NY**

**Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters**

**Saturday, May 21, 1983**

            Logan didn’t bother to knock, just balanced the tray in one hand and opened the door to the girl’s bedroom. He had already seen her naked, and concentrated on keeping the memories of her in that condition in the same mental file where he kept memories of furniture and landscape: possibly pretty, but of no particular interest, and definitely not to be manhandled.

            He set the food tray down on the dresser, tossed the clean sweats and underthings onto the desk, and set about stripping the dirty sheets and wet blanket from the bed, making it back up with the clean, dry sheets and blanket he had brought. The bathroom door was still closed, though he could hear the sound of splashing water in there. The smell of soap stung his keen nostrils as he worked, and after he had finished making the bed, he heard the water draining away. He paused and rapped on the door lightly. “You okay in there?” he called patiently.

            “No,” the girl said, sounding frustrated. “No matter how many times I wash my hair and how much I brush it, I’m not strong enough to get it untangled.”

            “I’m going to leave your clothes on the floor outside your door,” he said. “If you want to dry out and get dressed, then come out with the brush and I’ll see if I can’t help you.”

            He set the clothes down by the door, and it cracked open a bit. She was swaddled in a towel wrapped around her, steam filling the air, and was pink-cheeked and clean, but she was right:  her hair was still a matted, unholy mess. She reached down to seize the clothes and pulled them into the room, shutting the door again.

            She came back out about ten minutes later, holding the brush in one hand. He had moved the food tray to the desk and pulled the office chair out. “Tell you what,” he said as she looked longingly at the tray, her stomach growling. “You sit and eat and I’ll see what I can do about your hair. Might get it pulled a bit, but I figger I’m stronger than you.”

            She handed him the brush. “Thank you,” she said meekly, and sank into the chair, scooting it in closer to the desk before she began to eat. He took up a position behind her and looked at the mats, frowning.

            Her hair had clearly been at least to mid-back before she was abducted, and it didn’t look like Creed had ever cut it—or allowed her to wash it that often. He started at the bottom inch, working out the tangles one lock at a time; the worst mats would almost certainly have to be cut out. He didn’t think even Jean’s telekinesis would be able to undo the knots in such fine strands, but it would be possible to preserve most of it, he thought, and give her back her dignity and pride in her appearance. A girl her age was unlikely to just want to cut it all off so it could grow out untangled, he figured.

            She gobbled up the food as he worked with the brush, and he watched as the calories and nutrients—calcium for bone, protein for muscle—sank into her body; her half-formed foot finished regenerating before his eyes, and she wiggled her toes as the job was complete. He finished with her hair at about the same time; there was a sizeable pile of little knots that he had eventually had to cut out, carefully, and he swept them up with one hand and tossed them in the little garbage pail next to her desk.

            She had finished eating, all but licking the plate and soup bowl clean, and in the muted light from the desk lamp, she looked utterly normal—a lovely eighteen-year-old girl with no sign of the many traumas she had endured etched into her features. “Thank you,” she said, reaching back to run a hand through her hair. There were places where it was a little ragged, but a trim would take care of that. She could stop at a salon tomorrow while she was out with Jean and the girls.

            “You should get some sleep now,” Logan said. “I cleaned up the bed, got you dry blankets.”

            She glanced at the bed, but shook her head. “Not tired,” she murmured. “Being more or less dead left me well-rested.” She offered him a slanted smile. “Where am I?”

            “Oh yeah,” he said. “This is Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Westchester, New York.”

            She arched a brow. “New York. That’s…way east of where I was,” she said quietly. “Are there a lot of students here? Are you a teacher?”

            “There’s some. We got lotsa room to grow, yet.” He laughed at the idea of himself as a teacher. “Eh, not a teacher. Chuck ain’t roped me in that far yet.”

            “Chuck?”

            “Charles Xavier. Yer dad,” Logan said. “He’s worried about ya.”

            She lowered her head for a moment. “My other mom and dad…I never knew I was adopted until Creed told me. They never said.” She looked up at him. “Is he nice?”

            He tried to decide how to answer that question. “He’s smart. An’ he’s kind. He’s like you, a mutant…he’s got the same kinda mind powers you do, we all figger ya got that part of yer powers from him. We ain’t sure about the healin’. Ya mighta got that from yer mom, nobody knows yet. They might ask ya fer a blood sample so they can do some DNA testin’, try ta figure out who yer mom is.”

            She looked confused. “They don’t know who she is?”

            A smile played out across his lips. “Eh…yer dad was a bit of a player afore you were born,” he said. “Might be there’s more’n one lady it could be.”

            She flushed. “Awkward,” she muttered. “My dad is a man-slut.”

            He burst out laughing. “Yer priceless, kid,” he said with a grin. “That’s awesome.” He shook his head. “So ya ain’t tired at all?”

            “No,” she told him. “Nervous. Curious. Restless.” She looked out the window at the tree stump. “Is the student who killed that tree still here?”

            He blinked. “Uh…I dunno? I don’t know who killed the tree, I wasn’t here when it happened. Could find out, I guess.”

            “Do you think you could walk me around, give me a tour of the place? I might be tired enough to sleep after that,” she suggested. “It’s all nerves, just wear me out.”

            He pinned her with a dubious look at her unintended double-entendre, but glanced at the alarm clock on her bedside table. The glowing red digits said it was after two-thirty in the morning, late enough that most people would probably be in bed—except, of course, Hank in his lab, and possibly Xavier, if he hadn’t continued drinking. “Ain’t got no shoes for ya,” he pointed out. “Feet gonna get cold.”

            She snorted. “I haven’t worn shoes for the last five years,” she replied. “And at least I have _two_ feet now.”

            He winced. “Fair ‘nough,” he agreed, getting to his feet. “I s’pose you’d be gettin’ a tour tomorrow anyhow. Come on.”

            She rose from the desk chair and piled her empty dishes back onto the dinner tray, then picked it up. “Can we take these back to the kitchen when we go back?” she asked politely. “I don’t want to make a mess.

            “Eh, it ain’t a big deal—” he started, but she interrupted, a slightly more nervous tone to her voice.

            “No, I mean I _can’t_ have a mess,” she said, fidgeting. “That subcellar was filthy. Everything about it. Mildew and black mold on the walls. And that mattress—” she shuddered. “The idea of any sort of…of-of dirty, or mess, or untidiness makes my skin crawl. And I start getting…panicky.”

            “Panic attack,” he said quietly, nodding. “Goes with PTSD. Prob’ly yer gonna be dealin’ with it a long time. I ain’t no shrink, but I’ve had my own issues like that.” He thought about it. Given how long she’d been underground, with no fresh air or sunlight, she was probably going to be equally panicky about ever going underground again, too…which made things problematic when Xavier got around to training his daughter in the Danger Room. “Yeah, c’mon, we’ll head for the kitchen first.”

            She flashed him a grateful smile and followed along.

            He led her out of the bedroom, down the hall, and made a beeline for the kitchens, which were as abandoned now as they were when he had put the meal together for her—more so, given that Xavier was gone. Logan rather doubted the Professor had gone to bed; more likely, the old man was in his office, sobering up and watching them every step of the way.

            Lauren was meticulous in rinsing off all the dishes and then loading them into the dishwasher, although given that hers were the only dishes in there—it was long after dinner for the rest of the students—she did not insist on wasting water by running a partial load right away. He guided her out of the kitchen, showing her where the library was, the game room, the elevator, the stairs down to the basement and the Danger Room.

            She gazed at the stairs and elevator uneasily, confirming to his mind her likely discomfort with going back underground at all. “What’s the Danger Room?” she asked.

            “It’s a place ta train mutant powers,” he said. “Robots, 3-D visuals, that sorta thing. Ya probably won’t start with that right away. Professor X’s gonna wanna get you settled in first.”

            She nodded, and he showed her the meeting rooms, the living room, the east and west wings where labs and classrooms were. One door stood ajar, light spilling out through the crack, and Logan could hear someone moving around in there. As it was Hank’s lab, he was unsurprised to smell McCoy’s scent from the room.

            “Ya wanna meet someone new?” he asked. “Or wait ‘til later?”

            She didn’t answer at first, and her gaze looked faraway, distant. She had glazed off numerous times during the tour, as if looking at and listening to something that he couldn’t see—maybe on a telepathic level he had no access to.

            At last, she looked up. “The man in there?” she asked, and he nodded. “Okay. He doesn’t want to hurt me either, even if he does have fur and claws like Creed. But blue.”

            Logan winced and beckoned her to follow him, stepping forward to rap on the door. “Hank?” he called out. “Ya got a moment ta meet the newest student, now that she’s awake?”

            The door opened carefully, and Hank looked startled as he appeared framed in the doorway. “Oh, my stars and garters,” he murmured. “You’ve recovered quite quickly, young lady. It is my pleasure to meet you. Welcome to Professor Xavier’s school.”

            She gave him a shy smile, seemingly unafraid of the fur or his fearsome visage. “Hi,” she said, staying close to Logan’s side. “I’m Lauren. Lauren Dra—no, I guess it’s Lauren Xavier, now.” She flushed.

            “My name is Henry McCoy, but everyone calls me Hank. Or Beast.” He looked up at Logan. “And I see you’ve met our Wolverine already.”

            She nodded. “On the plane, first,” she said quietly. “I could… _feel_ others there. I just couldn’t…control my powers much yet, then.” A shadow passed over her face and she sighed. “I had no control over them at all the first time. I killed…a lot of people.”

            “Hey,” Logan said firmly. “That was not your fault. Don’t you think it is.”

            She tilted her head to look up at them. “He said it was,” she said softly.

            “He…he who? Creed? He’s a murderer. Of course he’d want you to think you were as bad as him. Your guilt would let him control you. Don’t you even think that,” Logan said sternly.

            “Logan is right,” Hank agreed. “There’s no similarity whatsoever between the two of you. Almost none of us have any control over our powers when they first manifest. Creed is an intentional killer, a pure sociopath. He takes pleasure in committing murder. The two of you aren’t remotely the same.” He frowned. “If you give a toddler a gun, is the toddler to blame for shooting someone? Not only do they not know they shouldn’t do so, they don’t even know what they’re doing.”

            “You need training in your gifts. All of them. But you are not responsible for those deaths,” came a calm, warm voice from behind them.

            Logan turned, grimacing. Xavier sat there in the hallway behind them, in his chair; Logan had neither heard nor smelled his approach. Lauren drew back a bit, not hiding behind Logan like a child might, but definitely withdrawing a little.

            “Eh…this is yer dad, kid,” Logan introduced gruffly. He eyed Xavier. “Thought ya were gonna wait a bit?”

            Xavier offered him a wan smile. “In the end, I didn’t have that much willpower,” he admitted. “Good evening, Lauren. I am Charles Xavier.”

            “Hi,” she said quietly. “I’m Lauren.”

            “So, Lauren,” he said lightly. “Like Logan here, you heal yourself—” he nodded at Logan, “and like me, you read minds.”

            She studied him for a moment. “My mother was Amanda Klein. You met her three weeks before you graduated with your Ph.D., out one night at the Golden Horn. You were more than a little drunk.” Out of the corner of one eye, she saw Hank’s jaw drop, and Logan made an amused sound. Xavier looked poleaxed. “You’d been drinking Harp Ale.”

            “That’s—that’s extraordinary. I didn’t even feel you in my mind—” he stammered.

            “I didn’t read your mind,” she said quietly. “I _can_ —well, maybe not yours, there’s some sort of wall there—but…” She made a face. “I read…history. I read…time.” Xavier gaped like a fish beached on the bottom of a boat. “The ghosts of the past, dancing around us, forever. Not just…people, either. Things. Every single thing I lay eyes on. The memories of the earth, everywhere I look.” She took a step forward into the lab, bring her hands down to rest atop the wooden office desk there, littered with Hank’s notes, tools, and the surface scarred with chemical burns, old cigarette marks. “The wood this desk is made of is red oak. The trees that were chopped down to make it were felled in 1858. There were six of them. They were 321, 344, 220, 112, 357, and 288 years old. The ph of the soil they grew in, that of the forest they lived in, was 6.8. They knew more sunny days than rainy ones.” They were staring, and she drew a breath. “The nails holding it together were forged by hand by the local farrier. His name was…” her eyes went distant for a moment before she spoke again. “…Arnuld Stonemeier. German blood, descended from a Hessian soldier who survived the Revolutionary War and settled in New York state afterward. Arnuld was 47 years old the day he made these nails.” Her fingers twitched, curled, uncurled. “Out on the back lawn, past my doors, too many millions of years ago to count, a dinosaur fell there. I don’t know what kind, because it didn’t have a name for itself. One of the meat-eating ones, by the teeth, but not as big as a T-Rex. Something from the Allosaurus family, I think. His bones are still there, about twenty feet down, turned to limestone, preserved forever.” She gave them a ghastly smile. “Ghosts.” She wavered a little, steadied herself. “I don’t know how to turn my power off. I learn everything there is to know about everything and everyone I look at, and frankly, it’s making me a little psychotic. My mind is filling up very fast.”

            “Remarkable,” Xavier breathed, shaking his head.

            “That’s…that’s…unbelievable,” Hank raved, looking envious and amazed.

            “Guys. Ya missed the part where she said it was makin’ her psychotic?” Logan said impatiently.

            She looked up at him, and her gaze was very sad. “Creed is your half-brother,” she said softly.

            He staggered back as if she had punched him, his eyes going huge with shock. “What? No, that can’t—”

            “Your name is James Howlett,” she said. “You were born in 1888 in Alberta, Canada, not far outside of the town of Banff. Your parents of record were John and Elizabeth Howlett, but your real father was Thomas Logan, their groundskeeper, who was Creed’s father, too. You had different mothers.” There were tears glimmering in her eyes, and suddenly she looked as though she had aged decades, weary sorrow in her expression. “You can’t remember anything because Stryker put two adamantium bullets into your head two years before I was abducted. Your healing factor restored the tissues of your brain, but it couldn’t recover the memories that were destroyed when the brain tissue was torn apart. I can see it all, like a movie…” She reached out one shaking hand, as if to touch his face.

            Logan fled.

            Xavier looked at Hank, dumbfounded. “Is there any way we can verify…”

            “I could…take samples from the desk. Carbon-date the wood, run mass spectrometry on the wood and one of the nails. That’d give us the ph balance of the wood and steel, tell us how old the wood was,” Hank said slowly.

            “I meant…Logan,” Xavier said faintly.

            “Newspaper articles,” Lauren said hollowly. “Thomas Logan came to the Howlett manor drunk and ended up shooting John Howlett when . That’s when Logan’s powers manifested, his claws…he stabbed Thomas Logan. Who told him with his dying breath that he was Logan’s father. There was…a manhunt. He and Creed fled.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “There are newspaper articles.”

            The two men regarded her in something akin to awe. “Lauren, that’s—” Xavier faltered.

            “I’m going to go back to my room now,” she said quietly, not looking at either man. “I’m…tired.”

            Without waiting for them to answer, she left.


	6. Hope Kills

_“There is no despair so absolute as that_

_which comes with the first moments of our_

_first great sorrow, when we have not yet known_

_what it is to have suffered and be healed,_

_to have despaired and have recovered hope.”_

_\--George Eliot_

_“Because I remember, I despair.”_

_\-- Elie Wiesel_

 

 

**Westchester, NY**

**Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters**

**Saturday, May 21, 1983**

            Lauren hid in her room; dawn came a few hours after she had fled back to her bedroom after meeting her father. An hour or two after that, someone knocked on her door. It was more than an hour before she could make herself go look; when she did, she found that someone had left her a covered breakfast tray with bacon, waffles, oatmeal, fresh orange juice, tea, and hot buttered toast. A glance at the tray had shown her that it was Hank, and then she saw the pig that the bacon had come from, fields of oats and wheat, several orange trees, a tea plantation in India, a number of maple trees, and a cow, grazing in the fields before being milked and the milk being separated from its cream to make butter—plus the full life stories of every human involved in transforming those things from their raw state into processed food. Her stomach twisted into knots, and she left the tray on her desk, going back to her bed and crawling under the blankets with her eyes closed. Her head throbbed from the input of so much trivial—even useless—information in such a short time, and she could feel a migraine coming on.

            “The mutant with the powers of Trivial Pursuit,” she whispered from under the blankets. “I didn’t ask for this. For any of this.” She felt wetness around one nostril and dabbed at it with a finger, risking opening her eyes. Blood was smeared over her finger. “Oh. Great.”

            She dragged herself up from bed and headed into her bathroom, turning on the shower. Her healing factor, she knew, would fix whatever had caused the nosebleed, but it couldn’t change the way she felt every time she remembered the shocked look on Logan’s face. “I’m a monster,” she muttered. “Or at least, an asshole.” She felt miserable at the memory, and climbed under the hot water quickly, trying to shut the thought out.

            The problem was, there weren’t that many other prominent memories to take the place of that one, and the ones she had were almost universally horrific. She leaned against the cool tile wall of the shower stall as the scalding water poured down over her head, mingling with the tears that were streaming from her eyes. She could feel another presence—vague and amorphous, but focused—and realized that her father probably did a good deal of telepathically watching over everyone under his roof to make certain things remained calm and stable.

            She dried off and climbed out, and put the sweats back on, and climbed back into her bed. The food Hank had brought her had gone cold. A glance at the digital clock on the bedside table showed her that it was a little before noon. Logan had mentioned the other women in the house taking her shopping some time today. She could not think of something she less wanted to do at the moment, other than falling back into Creed’s clutches, and for a moment, contemplated just going back to sleep.

            _I miss…need…Logan. I fucked up. He was my anchor amid all the strangeness. All the change. And in one careless, thoughtless moment, I opened my mouth and threw that all away._ She sank down on the side of her bed, fingers digging into the edge of the mattress, staring at the floor. _From the moment I opened my eyes after he dragged me out of Creed’s cellar prison, I felt like I could trust him. And now I’ve driven him away._

            ‘I didn’t mean to!’ was caught in her throat, wanting to burst out, but she swallowed it with a hitch in her breath. She could feel tears threatening to spill from her eyes like overfull rain clouds. Half a decade of hell. Her parents murdered. Knowing she was, herself, a murderer, even though she had never intended such. Trauma piled on trauma, crushing her down…her hands flew up to cover her eyes, shutting out the sight of the nice, normal, mundane room around her.

            _I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere. He should have left me in Creed’s basement._

            There was a knock at her door.

            Any sound she might have made froze in her throat, her head snapping up to stare at the doorway.

            The knock came again and a few seconds after that, Raven’s voice. “Lauren?” the other woman called, sounding concerned.

            Lauren sighed. “I’m here,” she said dully, getting to her feet and shambling over the door to unlock and open it.

            “Hey,” Raven said, smiling hesitantly. “Charles wanted me and ‘Roro to take you shopping. Jean’s with Logan right now, or she’d come with—”

            “With Logan?” Lauren asked, both curious and uneasy in equal measure.

            “He’s in the Danger Room,” Raven said. “I guess he had some things to work out—are you okay?” she asked.

            Lauren had felt her expression change when Raven had answered her question. “I see,” she said. “I…no, I guess I’m not really okay. It’s just a lot to—” To her horror, she felt tears well up in her eyes. “—a lot to…to…”

            “Hey,” Raven stepped in close, her arms coming up to go around her, and Lauren recoiled.

            “DON’T TOUCH ME!” he shrieked, feeling something unfold in her mind and lash out, and Raven screamed, slamming back against the wall, her eyes going huge.

            Lauren backed up to her bed, then jerked away from it. She didn’t want anyone touching her, and she didn’t want to be anywhere near a bed at the moment. She broke fee and ran for the French doors, throwing them wide, and ran out into the back yard, the grass soft under her bare feet. Her breath burned harshly in her lungs, tears stinging in her eyes. She could suddenly feel Creed’s weight pressing down on her again, the stink of his breath—blood and rotting meat—in her nostrils, his dirty fur against her skin, his grunting growls in her ears. She wanted to rip her own skin off, jam pencils in her ears, burn out her sense of smell with bleach. Forever. Worst of all, she could almost feel him inside her, ripping, tearing with his rigid flesh, blood on her thighs—not just the first time, it had been every time—as he pumped and labored above her, pinning her to the mattress.

            They had thought they had rescued her.

            There was no rescue from her own memories. Only Hell.

            She found herself standing at the edge of a lake, and the urge to just walk out into the water until it was over her head, and keep walking until she could no longer breathe, was suddenly very strong. The cool lake water would cleanse her, washing Creed’s stink out of her nose, wipe away the filth he had left on her skin.

            “Kid.”

            She went stiff at the sound of the familiar voice from behind her. She wanted to turn and look, desperately wanted him to be there, but at the same time, she was not sure she could stand to look in Logan’s eyes after how she had hurt him earlier.

            “Is Raven okay?” she rasped steadily. “I didn’t mean to hurt her, I just…she was going to touch me, and I…the memories were too strong, I couldn’t…” She trailed off, still not turning around to look.

            “Raven’s fine, kid,” he said patiently. “She’s touch. She understands why it happened. She says she’s sorry.”

            “I’m sorry about her, and…sorry about what I told you,” Lauren said, and the tears in her eyes spilled over, running down her cheeks. She tried to breathe and it came out as a sob.

            He didn’t touch her, but she could suddenly feel him, the heat of his body, right behind her. “You didn’t do anythin’ wrong,” he said gruffly. “Ya didn’t know better.”

            “That’s not good enough,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, but that’s not good enough, either. I’ve been hurt before. I don’t want to hurt anyone, ever. I should have known the news would hurt. I should have kept what I saw to myself.”

            “But ya didn’t know,” he said, and his voice was even closer. “No point in cryin’. It’s over an’ done with. C’mon, turn around.”

            She wiped her sleeve across her face hastily, scraping the tears away, and turned on nearly numb legs to face him.

            Most of his hair had been scorched away and was slowly growing back, even his brows and lashes. She clapped a hand over her mouth to hold in a gasp as she saw sheets of charred skin flaking away from his face, the skin—and the muscle underneath it—regenerating a bit at a time. His clothes reeked of smoke.

            “What happened?” she asked, taking in the devastation.

            He shrugged. “Danger Room,” he said. “There’s a bunch of robots that’d be regrettin’ usin’ flamethrowers on me if they were still operational enough ta realize how poorly that’d turn out.” He cracked half a smile.

            “Was that…stress relief?” she asked awkwardly. “Because of…what I said?” Guilt burned in her gut like napalm.

            He shrugged again, then nodded. “Eh…I dunno if I’d call it stress relief. That usually involves beer. But don’t beat yerself up over it. That ain’t hardly the worst thing I ever had ta deal with. Chuck sent me out after ya whammied Raven. He was worried. I don’t think he really gets all yer goin’ through, I’m afraid. He don’t got a lotta practice in bein’ a dad, an’ th’ other stuff ya went through…well…” He shook his head. “Yer dad knows how it hurts to not be able ta walk, but what happened t’ you…that’s new ta his experience.” He studied her quietly for a moment. “I’ll be blunt. Rape takes a long time ta heal from. Sometimes it never heals at all. I ain’t so sure Creed is gonna survive ta be handed over to the authorities, even if he is my brother. I hated him even before I found out what he did ta you. Not ‘cause yer the Professor’s daughter. Ya coulda been any girl an’ I woulda felt that way. Even animals don’t do what he did.”

            “I…Creed’s here? In the house?” she asked, then faltered.

            “We got secure detainment quarters ‘bout five stories underground,” he told her. “He’s there.”

            She shuddered. “I…can’t go underground,” she said hoarsely. The idea of descending to a place like the one where she had been kept captive—cold, dirty, damp, dark—made her skin crawl and her heart hammer in her chest so hard that, if she hadn’t known better, she might have suspected that she was having a coronary.

            “No one ‘spects ya to,” he said. “Chuck don’t even have ya scheduled fer the Danger Room any time soon. He’s gonna be handlin’ yer mental trainin’. No touchin’, there. I’ll be handlin’ yer physical trainin’, teachin’ ya how ta fight, when yer ready for it. Yer healin’ factor handles itself. That other gift o’ yers, Chuck an’ Hank are lookin’ fer a way ta give it an off switch.”

            “That would be nice,” she said wearily, taking in the stories of his uniform, and the lake, and the plane flying by far overhead.

            “Yeah, I ‘magine,” he said. “Must be kinda like havin’ a ‘puter constantly printin’ stuff out in yer head…or maybe a TV, tuned ta some educational channel, dronin’ in the background that ya can’t ever quite turn off.”

            She lit up. “Yes, like that—exactly like that,” she said. “I only see each thing’s history once, the first time I see something I haven’t seen before, so if I’m here long enough, it’ll eventually mostly stop happening except a couple of times a day, but for now, when I’m new here…it’s pretty much everyone and everything I look at.”

            He nodded and changed the subject abruptly. “You eat yet?” he asked.

            She shook her head. “I…can’t,” she said miserably. “Someone left me food earlier, breakfast steak and eggs. I saw a cute little calf and fluffy baby chickens.”

            He snorted. “Ya knew before ya had that power that everythin’ ya eat was once alive, or parts of it were,” he said.

            “Yeah, but I didn’t have to _see_ them as babies, then,” she said. “I can manage orange juice, and tea, and toast if it’s made without eggs, and fruit. I haven’t been able to eat meat since you took the collar off me.”

            He shook his head. “Yer body needs protein, ya gotta eat,” he said. “How ya gonna get around that? Even bacon—pigs—makes cute babies.”

            She grimaced. “I don’t know yet,” she admitted. “I had a deranged moment where I thought about cutting slices off myself and eating those. I already know what I looked like as a kid.”

            He stared, scowling. “Okay, badass, but gross. No way. Even if that weren’t the stupidest idea yet, no way Chuck would allow it. Even if the healin’ factor means it’d all grow back.”

            “I wasn’t going to really do it,” she said. “I was just desperate.”

            “How ‘bout we start with pancakes?” he asked. “Flour, water, salt, sugar, milk, butter, baking powder, eggs. I’ll hold th’ eggs up to a light and make sure they’re unfertilized. No fluffy baby chickens. Oh, and maple syrup.”

            Her stomach growled in response. “I think I could manage pancakes. And juice and tea,” she agreed hungrily.

            “Come on, then,” he said, waving her back toward the house. He did not try to put a friendly arm around her shoulders, or hold out a hand to her to hold, or try to touch her in any way.

            Lauren ducked her head down and followed him back inside.


	7. Waiting for the Miracle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Classmates. Can't live with 'em, not allowed to murder them in their beds.

_“We must let go of the life we have planned,_

_so as to accept the one that is_

_waiting for us.”_

_\--Joseph Campbell_

_“Nothing left to do_

_when you know that you've been taken._

_Nothing left to do_

_when you're begging for a crumb_

_Nothing left to do_

_when you've got to go on waiting_

_waiting for the miracle to come...”_

_\--“waiting for the miracle,” Leonard Cohen_

 

 

**Westchester, NY**

**Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters**

**Saturday, June 11, 1983**

            Although Lauren had not yet been able to make herself leave the school yet for any reason—Raven had found it necessary to take on her shape, complete with her exact measurements, to buy clothes for her—she had finally gotten over her despair and grief and terror enough, after three weeks, to start taking classes with Xavier, designed to train her mental powers.

            The initial tests that he had conducted had revealed that she could telepathically speak to others, read minds, and astrally project her mind, and could wield violent and fearsome mental blasts capable of injuring or killing weaker minds. It was that power that had wreaked such havoc among both the teens and adults at her school and in her town. Aside from those gifts, there was also the power that let her see the history of anything she laid eyes on. There was a version of the power Xavier had encountered before which required the user to touch the item he or she was examining, and that gift was called psychometry. Given the similarity between the two gifts, Xavier had chosen to differentiate between the two by defining them as Tactile Psychometry—the usual form—and Visual Psychometry, her more powerful form.

            To practice with that power—and to cut down on the constant triggering of it inadvertently--Xavier had suggested that she go through the public areas of the school—not other students’ private quarters, but places like the kitchen, the main dining room, the living room, the library, the den, the game room, his office, the stairways and corridors—as a sort of homework. He had encouraged her to go anywhere on the grounds as well, including the boathouse down by the lake, the long lane, the tennis and basketball courts, and the driveway and carriage house/garage. The more she saw of those areas, the less she would trip over new areas, items, and people in the future.

            With Xavier’s help and patience—though she had still not been able to bring herself to call him ‘Dad’, a thing which she could sense caused him no small amount of sorrow—she had finally been able to unwind enough to join the younger students in the dining room for meals—at least, so long as no one tried to touch her. There were almost a dozen students who were neither teachers nor part of the X-Men: Kitty, who could make her body intangible to pass through solid objects and keep from getting hurt; Doug, whose gift allowed him to read, write, speak, or translate any language he encountered; Xi’an, who could telepathically possess people; a girl with a pair of working, giant butterfly wings who just called herself Pixie; a boy with the head and taloned forelimbs of a chicken, who called himself Beak; a blue-haired girl named Erin who could control water; a girl named Paige with a Southern accent who could peel her skin off and transform into any substance, who answered to the code name ‘Husk’; a girl who could control lava and earthquakes, and transform into living lava, named Amara, who used the code name ‘Magma’; a boy with green scaly skin and the ability to cling to vertical surfaces, who answered to ‘Anole’; and finally, another telepath, a boy by the name of Quentin Quire, who wore geeky glasses and a pink mohawk.

            Lauren was still working on learning to build her own mental shields. Xi’an and Quire had their own, so she heard no feedback from their minds, but of the other eight, only Kitty had been in training long enough to keep her thoughts to herself.

            The others meant well, but had far less control over their thoughts, which is how she came to learn that most of the students knew what had happened to her and whose daughter she was. Quire had mentally overheard Ororo talking about it with Kurt, the demonic-looking teleporter, and he had shared it with Paige, who he was trying to impress enough to get her into bed.

            Lauren didn’t hate Husk, who had quite properly been horrified by the disclosure of such sensitive and private information, and refused to have anything to do with Quentin. She didn’t blame Quire, whose mind was as powerful as her own, and almost as powerful as Jean’s, for being able to overhear what he had heard.

            But she definitely hated him for sharing it, and because her control over her mental blasts were nowhere near powerful enough to get through his shields to give him a migraine, she had settled for using her psychometry to find out every embarrassing thing that he had ever done, or that had ever happened to him in his life and teased him about those things in front of their teammates whenever they were together for a meal.

            Doing so had led to her finding out that she had another mental power that the initial tests had not revealed, the ability to project mental images into the real world. _Showing_ her classmates that Quire had been a bedwetter almost until he turned 12 had been infinitely more satisfying than just telling them.

            She had not been a stereotypical ‘mean girl’ back before her powers had manifested, back before Creed had abducted her, back before those two things had destroyed her life.

            But her captivity with Creed had left her with a deep and violent refusal to let anyone hurt her in any way, ever again. That meant an eye for an eye, a hand for a hand, and a humiliation for every humiliation. If that was the only way to make others leave her alone, she had decided, so be it.

            She returned to her room in silence after breakfast to do her homework. So far, until her trauma was not as fresh, Xavier had agreed to let her take her classes in private, on the computer with the school’s intranet, but she knew that eventually, she would be expected to join the other students in the classrooms.

            She had two chapters in her math textbook to read, and the questions at the end of each of those chapters to answer, and then a ten-page book report to write and turn in by tomorrow. Homework had gotten quite a bit easier with the manifestation of her powers, since it only took looking at her textbooks to know everything in them—every story, every equation, every drop of ink that had been printed into the text telling its stories and secrets—including the answers. It worked better for math and science than literature, since she still had to write the book reports and term papers herself, but it was an improvement over the old methods.

            There was a knock at her door.

            Lauren narrowed her eyes, putting the book aside. She sat on her bed, cross-legged, comfortable in jeans and a t-shirt and socks, a baggy black sweatjacket on over it. After spending more than three full years being forced to be naked, and always cold, she found that, since being freed, she preferred never to go without clothes, or even scantily clad, as much as possible. She had to be naked in the shower or bathtub, of course, and gym classes would eventually involve swimming, but other than that, she kept herself bundled up as much as possible, no matter how hot it got.

            She climbed off the bed and approached the door with the same wary slowness that she might have approached a poisonous snake. The knock came again, this time accompanied by a voice that had her instantly and subconsciously baring her teeth in a rictus snarl.

            “Come on, daddy’s girl, I know you’re in there,” Quire called. “I can feel your mind. It’s like a rabid hive of yellowjackets.” He paused. “I can’t _read_ your mind, your shields are already too strong, but I can feel it,” he muttered.

            She yanked the door open with a growl. “ ** _What?!”_** she snapped, glaring at him.

            He held up both hands in a gesture that was meant to be placating. “Hey, truce,” he said. “Possibly, just maybe, I made a mistake in running my mouth off before. I came to make it up to you.”

            “You can’t,” Lauren said flatly. “I can’t think of a thing that you can do that would erase what you did.”

            “You might not think so,” he coaxed. “But only because you don’t know what I know.” He smiled, the surface of his mind opaque and glassy, bright and hard as the metal that made up Logan’s claws, and equally impermeable. He smiled again and held out his hand. “C’mon, there’s something I want to show you.”

            She gave him an incredulous look. His smile made her feel vaguely queasy, as if she had eaten something that was spoiled and was coming down with the first stages of food poisoning. “I’m not taking your hand,” she said contemptuously. “Don’t you pay attention to anything but what’s in your head and in your pants? I don’t touch people. And I don’t let anyone touch me.”

            “Except Wolverine,” he laughed, the sound amiable enough rather than mocking. “Everyone saw him carry you inside from the Blackbird when you first arrived.”

            She glowered, but she couldn’t deny he was right. She hadn’t been capable of walking under her own power then, after nearly starving to death. But Logan had been very careful since then not to touch her again.

            For a brief, shocking moment, she wasn’t sure if that was a relief…or a disappointment.

            “Look,” he said, a trifle impatiently. “There’s something I think you should know. I just wanna show it to you. And no, it’s not the usual thing I would want to show a pretty girl. You’re in danger and you don’t realize it. It’s not through anyone’s malice that you’re in danger, just people being people—specifically, inefficient and lazy.”

            “What’s this about?” she asked, a note of nervous worry starting to rise in her mind.

            “If I just tell you, there’s no way you’ll believe me,” he insisted. “It’s one of those things where seeing is believing. There’s something your father is keeping from you.”

            She vacillated for a moment, uncertain. Part of her wanted to laugh in his face and say that Xavier would never allow something that might bring her harm. Given how long it had been since they had brought her here, if she could still not bring herself to treat him with the same love she had felt for her adoptive parents—who, after all, she had been with for much, much longer—she at least could acknowledge him as her genetic father, and be grateful for this place he had built, and respect him for all he had done.

            But there was a small part of her—smaller than it had been when she first arrived here, but still existing—that trusted no one and nothing in all the world. It had not existed at all before Creed had abducted her, and she laid the blame for its creation squarely at the feet of that feral monster.

            She wanted to say that of _course_ her father would never do anything that might endanger her.

            But that little voice at the back of her head, the part of her that trusted no one—and certainly Quire was lumped in among that lot—kept asking, “Are you **_sure_**?”

            “Fine,” she said at last, her voice low. “But don’t touch me. And if this turns out to be some kind of trick, I will figure out a way to get into your head to fuck you up, even if I have to use a crescent wrench to do it.”

            He shook his head. “This way,” he said, stepping off her threshold, back into the hall. He threw her a look over his shoulder. “Oh…by the way. It’s downstairs.”

            She stopped in her tracks, a finger of cold sliding down her spine, stopping her in her tracks. Quire paused at the same time, offering her a smile that was innocuous and innocent and almost sickeningly sweet.

            Her stomach curdled, wrapping itself around her backbone. _He knows I don’t like being underground,_ she realized. _He’s expecting me to back out. Maybe set it up this way on purpose, so he could call me a coward to the others, later on._

            She took a deep breath and nodded. “Lead the way,” she muttered.

            He led her down the stairs to the regular basement, which had been completely refurbished—rec room, industrial-sized laundry room, walk-in freezer and pantry with a freight elevator up to the kitchen, storage units. He led her to the elevator that went down to the sub-cellar; that needed a thumbprint and 16-digit numerical code to access, since one of the things on that level was the Danger Room, where Quire had bragged about training.

            For her part, Lauren was finding herself distracted and almost dizzy. She had not been down as far as the cellar before, which meant she was laying eyes on new things constantly, and her mind was consequently flooded with all the new information about every board in the wall paneling, every inch of carpet under her feet, every painting on the wall, right down to the dust motes floating in the air. (She had learned days ago that dust was 90% composed of dead, shed skin cells, so she was seeing the faces of all the students she had never met, some of whom were dead themselves. The new data pounded against the walls of her mind, leaving her breathless and unfocused and unthinking and more shaky than ever.

            They came out on the bottommost level and he led her past the entrance to the Danger Room to a door at the far end of the corridor there, where the only lock was a rectangular black glass panel, 3”x 6”, set into the wall to the left of the door.

            “Here we are,” Quire said cheerfully, almost gleefully. “Put your hand on the panel to open the door.”

            “What’s on the other side, Quentin?” she asked, and her voice sounded shaky—even fearful—even to herself.

            “Just put—here, like this,” he said impatiently, and grabbed her by the wrist. She let out a shriek and let her mind explode outward at his, as much concentration and aim as she was able to muster after becoming so disoriented with the influx of new data. His shields defected the psychic blast—not effortlessly, she saw him grimace—but she realized that she was scattered and fragmented and nowhere near her full strength because of it. She tried to yank her arm out of his grasp and he just laughed, slamming her palm flat against the scanner panel.

            The door slid open, revealing a grid of lines of golden energy criss-crossing a few feet in front of her, and he shoved her through the door.

            “This is for your own good!” he shouted as the door slid shut behind her, locking again. She managed to force her forward momentum to stop less than an inch before crashing into the grid at about the same time her nostrils registered a familiar scent.

            Scents were far more tied to memories than the senses of sight or even sound, and the pit dropped out of her gut as she recognized this one: heavy feline musk, old blood, dusty fur, and rotting meat.

            There came the unfolding of a low, guttural growl.

            Some very distant part of her mind reflected ironically that Quentin had told the truth. For all that he had just betrayed her—and, in a way, Xavier—he had said that she was in danger, that Xavier had been keeping something from her, and he was right. She had not realized that Creed was still here, that she and he were dwelling under the same roof. She understood **_why_** he had said nothing; she would have fled the school, or tried to, in raw and unadulterated terror if she had known—or possibly have succumbed to a coronary if someone had kept her from running.

            She felt her bladder let go, felt the warm stream trickle down the inside of her legs. Worse, she heard the long, slow inhalation from Creed as he breathed in the stink of her terror.

            “Hey there, pretty lady,” his deep, rumbling voice poured over her from the other side of the laser grid. “Did you miss me?” The golden light flashed over his bared fangs inside the broad grin as he stepped as close to the grid as he could without actually touching it. “I missed you.”

            She whimpered, backing up until her shoulders hit the door, trying to put as much space between them as she could. She realized the grid—like the heavy steel door and the palmprint lock—were meant to keep him in here, and would probably work to do so under normal circumstances. The lock and door, especially, would doubtless serve to keep him in the cell.

            But the laser grid would only keep him confined to his side of the cell, she thought, when there was nothing he wanted on **_this_** side of the cell.

            She could hear his breathing slowly speeding up. For a moment, she wondered how it was that her palmprint would open the lock, and then realized it had probably been child’s play for Quire to hack the security system, aided by using his telepathy to lift the passwords and codes of any non-telepath who was authorized to use the system or be down here. Hank, or Logan, or possibly Ororo or Kurt. Not her father, of course, and not Jean.

            “C’mere, sweetheart,” Creed purred hoarsely, a greedy tone in his voice that she recognized very well. It was the same tenor to his voice right before he took her every time—hungry, wheedling, possessive.

            If he decided he wanted her, no matter what, he would walk right through the laser grid and let it cut bits off him, and think it a small price to pay to rape her again.

            “I want to taste you,” he growled. “I want to lick you all over and then fuck you until you scream.”

            “How about we skip the fucking and I just scream?” she said faintly, her hands clenched so tightly into fists that she felt the slow, hot upwelling of blood where her nails cut into the soft skin of her palms.

            He snarled animalistically at the scent of her blood and lunged forward, hissing as the lasers bit into his skin, stripping off a long slice of flesh from the outside surface of the arm he thrust through the grid, from his wrist to his elbow. The lasers cauterized the wound instantly, and his taloned fingers wiggled as they reached for her, stopping just six inches shy of being able to reach her.

            “So why’d they stick you in here with me, sugarplum?” he growled, leaning in an inch closer, his chest brushing against the laser grid, the lasers burning away skin and hair and the top layer of tissue. “Don’t know the smell of the one who pushed you in here. Not your dad, not the runt. I could smell it was a guy, younger than you. What’s the matter, did he want you and you told him no? Is he pissed off because my toy wouldn’t put out?” His growl went from taunting, almost pleased, to blood-chillingly enraged. “You belong to me. No one gets to touch you but me. Not Logan, and not some snot-nosed brat. If I found you’d been with someone else, I’d kill you both.”

            She greyed out for a minute then, the lump of fear in her chest climbing up the inside of her throat to choke her. Lauren slid down the door behind her until she was seated on the floor, legs out in front of her, head slumped forward on her chest.

            Some part of her was detached and floating, wondering how long it would be before someone realized she was missing, and came to save her. Was this cell made for Creed in specific, or could it be used to imprison any mutant? If the latter, then the cell was likely shielded against telepathy, both from inside and out, and Xavier would not hear her no matter how much she ‘screamed’.

            Creed’s fingers closed over the tip of her shoe.

            She screamed as he sank his claws into the tip of her sneaker and then dragged her closer, the stench of burning fur and flesh rising as he pulled his arm back through the grid.

            She began to kick at the talons embedded in her canvas shoe upper, because she had realized something, and it was certainly something he would have realized, as well.

            He was not afraid to go through the laser grid, no matter how much it would hurt, because he had a healing factor and would recover—but she had a healing factor also, and in his eyes, it would surely be better to pull _her_ through to _his_ side. The pain would knock the fight out of her while he forced himself on her, and it would take anyone who came to save her longer to get to her.

            She kicked him again, hearing bone break, desperately wishing she had been able to force  herself to fight past her trauma to start combat training with Logan. A broken finger or two would not slow Creed down even a whit.

            He growled again, dragged her forward another inch, and the lasers sizzled into the rubber top of her Converse.

            “Come here, baby girl,” he snarled. “I can smell you. I need you. I’m gonna fuck you until you bleed. Until you can’t walk. Until you die wrapped around my cock.”

            An eye appeared in her mind, a great, cold, still piece of her that had never been there before. It regarded the animal in front of her, his talons punched through her shoes and slashing at her toes, with no more fear or care than she would give a slab of cold meat.

            **< Kill him. You’re not wearing a collar that locks your powers away _now_**. >

            She froze as the idea sank in, and the sudden cessation of terror must have altered her scent. Creed peered at her through the laser grid, scowling, and she looked up at him, a ghastly smile on her face.

            “Never again,” she whispered, and her mind snapped out like a bullwhip with a lash as long and as thick as one of the major support cables on the Golden Gate Bridge. It hit his brain, cutting deep into the meat that powered his thoughts, and he screamed like a fox with its hind legs caught in a woodchipper.

            The sound was horrific.

            Blood gushed from his nostrils and ears, and he let her go, digging his claws into his scalp as if he could yank out the thing causing his pain.

            She did not relent. He had never paid any attention to _her_ screams, after all.

            Why should she concern herself over his?

            She lashed out at his mind again, and again. And again. For all the physical damage she was doing to the grey matter of his brain, severing neurons, tearing apart ganglia, turning his savage brain into a skull full of tissue that bore the same general consistency as a bowl of Campbell’s Chunky Beef Noodle soup, she was under no illusions that she could actually kill him. His healing factor would prevent that.

            “ **I. Don’t. Belong. TO YOU!”** she hissed, though she was uncertain whether he could hear her at the moment, and damn certain he couldn’t understand what she was saying, even if he _could_ hear it. It was also unsure whether he would remember what she was saying.

            No, her attack wouldn’t kill him. But she could hurt him, make it impossible to touch her just now. There was a taste of bitter metal at the back of her throat, the residue of spent adrenaline, but she was no longer afraid. Instead, there was a dark and gruesome glee at the back of her head, some part of her capering in grotesque celebration.

            She moved away from the laser grid, heart slowing back to a normal rhythm in her chest, and studied the wall. High up in the corner of the room, where wall met wall met ceiling, she spotted a tiny gleam of glass, almost certainly a fiber-optic camera. She wondered if Quire might be watching.

            “If you’re seeing me, Quentin, you should know that I intend to kill you for what you did to me. For what you planned to have done to me. It might take me awhile to get out of here. You would be best served using that time to get as far away from the school as possible. It won’t keep me from killing you, but it’ll keep you alive a little longer—as long as it takes me to find you.” Her voice was flat and cold and hard, and the fear that had been choking her was gone—where, she wasn’t sure, but being without it was a pleasure unlike any she had enjoyed since before her powers had first manifested.

            “Look…at…you,” Creed wheezed from the floor, where he had fallen. “Baby…badass.” She arched a brow, staring down at him as if he were a roach that had somehow become king of a dunghill, and he spat. “You… ** _loved_** it…bitch,” he growled, claws scrabbling at the concrete floor of the cell.

            “The scars that I wear like a cape say that I didn’t,” she said, chill and calm, and decided that those had to be the next thing to go. She didn’t want to carry the evidence of his torture around with her for the rest of her life. She struck out with the lash of her mental blast again, twice, three times, ten, until his liquefied brains poured out his ears and nose, and he flailed and spasmed on the floor, and shit himself, and was silent again, for awhile.

            The space from the door back out to the corridor and to the laser grid was spare, about five feet long by seven feet wide; there was more room than that on the other side of the laser grid, in Creed’s cell—enough for the tall man to stretch out and lay down. She watched him warily, peering through the grid at a distance. All there was on the other side was a hard steel shelf for a bed, a few feet off the ground, and a toilet, also steel, with no detachable seat, just as the bed had no mattress.

            It was almost fifteen minutes this time before he began to groan and stir, and without even turning to look, she put him down again, able to feel where he was from his mind. She knew she could put him down a hundred times and it would not come close to how much pain he had inflicted on her. But keeping him unconscious now was more a matter of safety than revenge; if he healed enough to gather his bearings, she had little doubt that he would be enraged enough to throw himself through the laser grid and eviscerate and eat her.

            After almost an hour alone with Creed, she heard a sound, sharp and metallic, from the door that Quire had pushed her through. She turned toward it, never taking her mental eyes off Creed, who was still recovering from the last dozen blasts ten minutes ago.

            The sound came again, changing tone in mid-note from a deeper ‘thunk’ to a shrill squeal. She could see the golden gleam of the reflection from the laser grid shimmer as the metal flexed and was bent like Play-Doh by some unimaginably powerful force.

            A ripple of tension ran through her as her anxiety ramped up again, and she suppressed a shiver. She could feel Creed behind her, almost recovered, gearing up for another go, and it was difficult to both monitor him behind her, without turning to look, and watch whatever it was peeling away the door to the cell like the thin tin lid of a sardine can.

            The door came crashing down in front of her, letting light spill around a tall, imposing figure that stood in silhouette. Behind him, she could see Logan and Xavier, and Logan stood with his fist wrapped brutally tightly around Quire’s throat.

            At the same time, she felt Creed snap to full alertness and health behind her, letting out a blood-curdling roar—no doubt equally in response to the sudden rush of Logan’s scent, carried into the cell on a gust of air as the air pressure between the hall outside and the cell equalized—as in enraged response to her repeated smackdowns.

            Being free was energizing. She smashed him down with her mind again, the blast doubled—even tripled—in power in comparison to the originals. He fell out of the air before he hit the grid, blood bursting from his eyes and ears and nose and mouth in a gory spray.

            Then he lay still.

            “Your daughter is alive and unharmed, Charles,” the stranger in front of Lauren said in urbane, polished tones. “In fact, I would hazard a guess that she is better than okay, as she has just used the gifts she inherited from your genetic code to swat this animal down like a fly, and I would further guess that she has been doing so on a regular basis since your soon-to-be-expelled miscreant of a student locked her in here with him. I am impressed. Your daughter, unlike you, is not afraid to hurt—”

            “To kill,” she interrupted to correct him.

            He smiled. It was not a nice smile, but it was a hypnotic one. “—to hurt **_or_** kill someone who threatens her safety.”

            “Not just Creed,” she said coldly, looking past the stranger to where Logan had corralled Quire.

            “Oh, I like her,” the stranger said with a grin. He extended a hand for her to shake. “My name is Erik Lehnsherr, my dear, but most call me Magneto.”

            She took his hand in hers without a qualm, gave it a shake, and smiled.


	8. Parable of the Mustard Seed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some trauma never heals.

_“You gain strength, courage, and confidence_

_by every experience in which you really stop_

_to look fear in the face. You are able to say to_

_yourself, 'I lived through this horror._

_I can take the next thing that comes along.'_

_\--Eleanor Roosevelt_

 

**Westchester, NY**

**Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters**

**Saturday, June 11, 1983**

            He stood there for a few seconds, still holding her hand, and for some reason, it wasn’t triggering her panic, just as Logan’s touch didn’t.

            But the same could not be said about Creed, who was waking. He dragged himself to his feet with a growl, ready to leap again, and then he saw Magneto’s hand around Lauren’s and went berserk.

            “ ** _MINE_**!” he roared, and threw himself at the laser grid before she could react, exploding through it, pieces of flesh flying off of him—ears and fingers and part of a leg, pieces of sizzling skin and muscle.

            Before she could smash him down again, there was a second roar, no less savage, and Logan hurtled past her where she stood in the doorway, almost knocking her down, his claws out and then buried in Creed’s chest. Magneto drew her back, out of the cell, to her father’s side, standing at her other side so she was bracketed between the two men like bookends.

            “ _Never – ever—again!_ ” Logan howled, slashing at Creed in a nearly insane frenzy. Creed was no less vicious, thrusting his talons into Logan’s stomach to gut him like a fish. 

            “ ** _NO!”_** Lauren screamed, and lashed out with her mind again, focusing very carefully, aiming precisely, and Creed dropped in his tracks.

            “Dear God,” she heard Xavier mutter under his breath, and glanced over her shoulder at him. It was at that moment she realized that Quire had taken advantage of Logan’s distraction and fled.

            Logan stepped out of the cell and eyed Magneto. “Great, bub, just great. He’s down for now, but the cell don’t got a door any more. How we gonna keep him in there in a few minutes when he wakes back up?”

            “We don’t keep him in there. We kill him,” Lauren said with chilly calm. She was trying very hard not to look at Xavier. She was afraid that all it would take before she started screaming in rage was the sight of his face, with either real or pretend concern in his eyes.

            But he spoke at her suggestion, shock in his voice. “Lauren, you cannot mean it, he said. “You’re just a child, you can’t understand what it truly means to so casually suggest throwing away a human life.”

            “Yer kiddin’, Chuck, right?” Logan said. “Yer gonna take th’ side o’ that animal over yer own daughter?”

            “I agree with Logan, much to my surprise,” Magneto said. “Creed preys on his fellow mutants, hunting and killing them both for pay and out of bloodlust. He has forfeited his right to exist.”

            Xavier looked less than surprised at their responses, and turned around in his chair to face Lauren, though he did not make the mistake of trying to take her hand. “You’re angry,” he observed. “It doesn’t take a mind reader to see that.”

            “Why would you still be keeping him under the same roof as me, given everything he did to me?” she pleaded, the anger draining out of her voice, desperate to understand. “Given that there’s always a choice he might have escaped—a small choice, maybe, but still a possibility—why would you condone that level of danger to me?” She clenched her fists. “I thought you were going to hand him over to the authorities! That’s what you said, anyway!”

            Magneto glanced at Xavier sharply, but said nothing.

            Xavier sighed. “That was the initial plan, until I contacted said authorities and learned that the only prison with the necessary security precautions to hold him had recently been attacked, and mostly destroyed, with many of its prisoners escaping. I determined that we could provide better security to detain him here until another facility can be sufficiently outfitted and reinforced to hold him. Unfortunately, that is apt to take months.” He stared up into her eyes. “I am sorry. When I made that decision, it would never have occurred to me that any student or team member would use Creed as a weapon.” _Now_ he looked angry. “Young Quentin is clearly  deeply disturbed, and he will be appropriately punished.”

            She arched a brow. “Punished? I’m going to kill him.”

            Xavier’s face contorted in distress. “Lauren, murdering someone cannot be your only way to react when someone upsets or offends you, just—”

            “Upsets? Offends?” she snapped, eyes narrowed in rage.

            “—think of the value of human life!” he finished, over her words.

            She scowled. “My life never had any value to Creed, or to Quire, apparently. Why should I care about theirs?”

            “Because you’re better than they are!” Xavier cried.

            “Yes. I am. And eradicating them so they can never hurt anyone else like they hurt me, ever again, proves I’m better than them. I look to the future. Think of the innocents they might hurt or kill someday! And don’t you dare try to tell me that people change, because they don’t. Sociopaths least of all.”

            Xavier stared, clearly appalled, but both Logan and Magneto were nodding.

            A low snarl like the sound of rotted cloth ripping rose up from the cell, and without even looking, Lauren smashed Creed down again with a volley of mental blasts.

            _“Unfortunately,”_ she continued, “I can’t kill Creed with the powers I have. He keeps healing. I’m thinking of going up to the kitchen to get the biggest knife I can find to come back and cut his head off. That might do it. Maybe.”

            “ ** _No_** ,” Xavier said quietly, looking devastated and disappointed. “I cannot allow that.”

            Lauren went rigid, opening her mouth to shout at him, then shutting it abruptly. “I see,” she said softly. “I see where your priorities lie. I assume I don’t get to kill Quire, either, though he threw me in with Creed to be either raped again, or murdered. Or possibly both.”

            Pain passed in a wave over Xavier’s face. “No, you can’t,” he confirmed. “Quire is 16. His brain is not yet finished developing. He makes rash and impulsive decisions, like all teenagers.”

            She nodded then, holding her body stiffly. “He is 16. I’m not. I’m 18, and so legally, that makes me an adult, however much you may disagree with that assessment. I can decide not to live under the same roof as the man who raped me almost every night for over three years, even if that means I end up homeless. But I rather think I can use my powers to _convince_ people to just give me enough money to live on.” It did not bother her to mention such unorthodox ways of surviving in front of Logan and Magneto; she had the impression both men had heard much worse. It **_did_** bother her to discuss what Creed had done to her, but Logan already knew, and she guessed that Magneto did so as well, if Xavier had called him in to remove the door to Creed’s cell. She was sure Lehnsherr would have wanted to know why Xavier had summoned him to deal with something as trivial as a possibly-jammed door.

            Xavier looked stricken at her calm words. “Child…no…” he faltered, clearly not having realized how strong her feelings were on the matter. “I cannot bear the thought of you leaving. You haven’t been here even a month, we have hardly begun to get to know each other yet.”

            “That don’t sound creepy at all, Chuck,” Logan snorted.

            Xavier shook his head. “I will find somewhere else to house Creed, I swear,” he insisted. “Even if I have to pay to have it built myself. Give me a week.”

            She stared at him for a moment, contemplating his request. “Fix the cell door, first,” she said at last. “Get him in the other side of the laser grid and make that stronger. He showed no hesitation whatsoever to cross through it, despite the pain and injury it caused, when he wanted something on the other side.” She gritted her teeth. “A week.”

            “I’ll move Creed,” Logan said grimly, and went to do so.

            Xavier nodded and she felt her father reach out telepathically, including them all in his communication. < _Hank, power down the laser grid in the cell so Logan can put Creed back in, please. Monitor via camera. When Logan is back out, power the grid up again—double strength._ >

            “I will fix the door,” Magneto said, and the broken door floated into the air with a wave of his hand. Lauren watched as the shattered metal dissolved into particles the size of dust motes, then came back together in one piece, more sturdy than before. With another wave, it floated to the doorway, the hinges and lock repairing and reconfiguring themselves as it affixed itself to the frame, again.

            “Thank you, Erik,” Lauren said quietly.

            Magneto favored her with a charming smile. “Of course,” he said politely. “I’m pleased to do whatever needs to be done to keep my old friend’s daughter safe.”

            Lauren glanced over at Xavier. “I haven’t forgotten about Quire,” she said. He gave her a worried look. “I can agree not to kill him if he faces the appropriate consequences for his actions,” she said grudgingly.

            “What sort of consequences are those?” Xavier asked.

            Lauren was quite sure that he could track down Quire no matter how far the other telepath ran. “The usual is arrest and then trial in front of a jury of his peers. No human court could hope to keep its judgment from being swayed by his powers, so I’m thinking a mutant court, with judge, prosecuting attorney, public defender, and a full jury. Even if there are no officially trained and licensed mutant lawyers or judges, there must certainly be those among us educated enough to serve in those positions. I don’t believe for a second that the people under this roof are the only mutants in the world,” she said.

            “Interesting,” Magneto murmured.

            She fixed her gaze on her father. “And you must recuse yourself from serving in any and all of those positions, being hopelessly compromised emotionally, and biased. Quire is your student, and I am your daughter. You could not be impartial toward either of us.” She smiled sadly. “Should he be found guilty, he must be locked up to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. You may need to construct another cell.”

            “ _Very_ interesting,” Magneto said. “You’re wasted here, young woman, though I question the soundness of your decision to use human law as a tool in this.”

            “All other things being equal—all parties involved being mutants—the legal framework is sound enough. Rape is rape, and attempted murder is attempted murder. No official human court would take on a mutant case unless the outcome was predetermined from the start. But a court run by mutants can be determined to be fair enough, I think,” she said. It was a more complex train of thought than she ever could have managed before her abduction; her formal learning had been put on hiatus between age 13 and now. However, as the information about everything she saw with her power downloaded directly to her long-term memory, her intellect had advanced by leaps and bounds. She estimated she had at least glanced at the spines of half of all the books in the library--thus gaining the knowledge of everything in them--just walking through the doorway, and at least a dozen of those had been legal tomes.

            There were also three different sets of encyclopedias in the library, too.

            Logan moved back out of the cell, and the laser grid sprang back up, eye-wateringly bright. Magneto gestured and the door swung closed slowly, locking itself even as she heard Creed’s growl from within as he woke.

            “You’re **_mine_** , little girl!” he roared. “Don’t you think you can ever get away! You belong to me and _don’t you forget it_!”

            Anything else he might have said was cut off as the door sealed itself shut. Lauren dragged a weary hand across her face as the last dregs of adrenaline and cortisol drained out of her system, leaving her exhausted.

            “What time is it?” she asked in a tiny, tired voice. Quire had brought her down here a little after 10 AM, after she had started her post-breakfast homework, and she knew she had been down here, fending Creed off, for at least an hour. Possibly more. Her stomach was clenching with hunger, but the stress had her so nauseous she wasn’t certain she should try to eat. She made a mental note to ask her father to buy her a watch.

            “It’s just after three in the afternoon,” Logan said tersely.

            Her jaw dropped. “Are…are you _kidding_ me?” she blurted, outraged and hurt in equal measure. “I was down here with Creed for **FIVE HOURS** and no one came looking for me? No one wondered where I was when I didn’t show up for lunch? No one—” She bit back the words —‘no one missed me?’—because the truth of them hurt far, far too much. Of course she hadn't been missed.

            Then again, she thought dully, how could she blame them? She couldn’t help her trauma or the PTSD it had left her with, but she kept everyone at a distance, had made no real friends—Logan could hardly count, given the difference in their ages—and tended to hide in her room except during mealtimes.

            She might as well not even exist, as far as they were concerned.

            Logan frowned, looking up at her, and she guessed that her scent must have changed, signaling her emotional upheaval. She knew well enough that the human body secreted different hormones and chemicals when it was under the influence of different emotional states—pheromones when sexually aroused, adrenaline when afraid or angry, cortisol when stressed, serotonin when happy, and a lack of it when sad—and she had little doubt that those chemicals changed a person’s scent when excreted in perspiration.

            “Lauren—” Xavier began, but she shook her head.

            “I’m going to my room,” she said tiredly. “I don’t know if I’ll be at dinner or not.” She slipped past her father, noting from his body language that he was resisting the urge to reach for her, and nodded flatly at Logan and Magneto in passing.

            She reached the elevator and pressed a button, standing there unmoving for several minutes before she realized nothing was happening. She resisted the urge to smack herself in the face, and clamped down on the urge to ask her father to make it work for her.

            Instead, she reached out with her own telepathy to Hank. < _Hank, this is Lauren. Could you please—the elevator is on the same level as the Danger Room. I want to go back up to the ground floor, to my room, but apparently I have no access clearance. Could you--?_ >

            She heard his thoughts in his head quite clearly, showing that, though he was no telepath himself, he was familiar with precisely focusing his thoughts for their benefit. < _Of course,_ > he thought politely. The elevator hummed to life and she waited only thirty seconds before the bell dinged and the doors slid open.

            She stepped inside and waited for the doors to close. Even as they began to do so, she heard Magneto’s voice from back down the hall, raised in ire.

            “You’re a fool, Charles! When will you learn that you can’t save everyone, and you have to occasionally choose who you want to save most? I cannot believe that you can’t see—”

            Whatever else he had been about to say was cut off as the doors finished closing, and then the elevator rose, taking her back up to the ground floor.

            Lauren managed to make it almost all the way down the hall to her room before the overload of adrenaline that had been dumped into her system finally had its moment. Her stomach rebelled, and she ran, racing to make it the last ten feet to her room before she threw up. She ran, shoving her door open, dashing across the room, into the bathroom, and was violently sick into her sink basin.

            When she was done, and had rinsed the mess down the drain—when her healing factor had whisked away her acid-raw throat and aching stomach muscles that had repeatedly clenched in frenzied heaves—she stripped out of her clothes, leaving them on the bathroom floor. She climbed into the shower and turned the hot water all the way up, feeling the heat scorch her, blister her skin until the fluid-filled bubbles popped and drained and healed. She stood under the steaming stream, head down, holding tight to the pain until the water began to go cold, letting her know that she had emptied out the industrial-sized hot water heater that supplied the school. She could see the tank held only cold water, see it from the piles hidden behind the wall that were anchored to the drain and faucets that she _could_ see.

            Eventually, she got out and dried off, using the towels to cover her hands when she picked up the clothes she had been wearing when she carried them to the trash can in her bedroom. Then she put on clean pajamas and crawled into her bed, pulling the blankets up around her face and head.

            She had kept Creed from doing anything worse to her—this time—than slashing up her toes, which had healed quickly enough. It was the _least_ harm she had ever taken from him, but knowing what he wanted, what he had intended to do, felt a little bit like being raped, all over again.

            _I will never be free of him._

_Never be safe._

_Never be whole again._

            In that moment, it occurred to her for the first time ever that it might just be better all around if she were dead.


	9. Give Me Something to Sing About

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's easier not to think of your own misery when you're focused on the pain of others.

_“Everyone suffers some injustice in life,_

_and what better motivation than to_

_help others not suffer in the same way.”_

_\--Bella Thorne_

 

**Westchester, NY**

**Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters**

**Saturday, June 11, 1983**

            **_“NO!"_**

            The mental shout from her father went off behind Lauren’s eyes like a bomb, and she screamed, clutching at her temples and dropping to the floor.

            < _Lauren, you **cannot**_ \--> was all the further he got before her mental shields slammed up, cutting him off and shutting him out.

            “Where do you get off, eavesdropping on my thoughts?!” she spat. The adrenaline was back—anger and fear and disbelief and sorrow and confusion tangled together like the arms of a basket full of octopi—and she wrenched her fingers away from her head and glared at the floor. “You don’t own me any more than Creed does!” she howled.

            < _If I would not allow you to kill Creed or Quire, what on god’s green earth makes you believe that I would allow you to kill yourself? >_ His mental voice came again, slipping past her shields, wheedling.

            “It was fucking rhetorical!” Lauren shouted aloud, bolting to her feet. “I have the same kind of healing factor as Creed and Logan do, and I can’t choose to shut it off! Short of finding a collar to slap around my neck like Creed did, I’m not sure I _can_ die!”

            There was silence after that, and she drew a deep, shuddering breath, shaking all over. “I’m not sure I can die,” she repeated. “But if you keep things up, I’m actually pretty sure you’re going to drive me _crazier_ ,” she amended. “Do you really want someone with my powers going full-on paranoid psychotic? I don’t think that’d be good for the school or the other students, and no, that was not a threat,” she hastened to reassure him. “Just a straightforward statement of fact.”

            The silence continued, and she crawled up onto her bed, sitting down under the covers with her back against the headboard, thinking of some of the things she had absorbed from some of the psychology books she had glanced at in the library. “Okay, so, look. I’m clearly dealing with the aftermath of the physical and emotional trauma of my abduction and captivity. As nearly as I can tell—being just a ridiculously self-educated layman rather than a doctor, and you can thank my gift for that—I’m suffering from C-PTSD and almost certainly the onset of trauma-induced paranoia, anxiety, and depression. Pity my healing factor doesn’t help with mental illnesses like it does physical ones. I should probably be on meds for these issues, but I estimate there’s at least a 75% chance that said healing factor would cleanse them from my system without helping.”

            He didn’t answer, but she had no doubt that he was still listening; she could feel the weight of his attention as he watched.

            “In the past, before this happened, I would have dealt with any similarly-traumatic event—like, say, the death of my adopted grandmother, which happened about six months before Creed kidnapped me—by turning to my friends, and coping with them with ice cream and gossip and goofy movies and crying jags. The problem is, I don’t have any friends like that here. The closest I am to anyone—including you—is Logan, and he doesn’t really strike me as the sort for watching “Clueless” and gorging on Rocky Road and painting each other’s toenails with glitter nail polish and giving each other makeovers.” The mental image of Logan with his claws painted Sparkle Bubblegum Pink made her smile, if only for a moment.

            < _What do you want me to do? >_ Xavier finally asked, and his tone was much calmer.

            “I don’t know!” she snapped, then sighed. “Sorry. I have all this information in my head, but I don’t have the life experiences to go with it. I might be 18, and legally an adult, but most of the time I still feel 13. You won’t let me kill either of the people who have done me wrong, which would maybe not solve any of my issues, but would at least have the advantage of being cathartic…” She shook her head. “13-year-olds don’t use the world ‘cathartic’.” She bit her lips.

            < _Perhaps you could continue to try to make friends here? >_ Xavier ventured carefully.

            “See, I was trying that before Quire pulled his little stunt. It might even have been working, I don’t know, I made a joke yesterday at breakfast and Kitty laughed and the rest of them didn’t look at me all weird, but now?” She gave her toes, sticking up under her blankets, a mournful look. “What Creed did destroyed my trust, pretty much completely. I was just starting to try to…to rebuild that. For you. Because you obviously care, about the other students and for me, and I want—wanted—to try to respond to that. He killed my parents. I didn’t have anyone anymore until I learned about you.” She realized there were tears sliding down her cheeks. “Because I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t do so well with not having anyone. No family, and no friends.” Her breath shuddered out of her. “I was just starting to try, and Quire did what he did, and now…now I’m right back to not trusting anyone. And this time, that includes you. He said there was something you were keeping from me that was dangerous to me, and he was right.” She swiped her tears away with one pajama top sleeve. “I still want to trust you and love you but I don’t know how to, anymore. I’m afraid if I let my guard down, I’ll find out something else about you like that, and if I do…” She stared at the far opposite wall. “…third time will really be the charm. I might still be breathing, but it’ll break me for good.”

            < _You said you don’t know what you want me to do, >_ he ‘sent’ patiently, his voice back to being calm and professorial. < _What do **you** want to do? >_

            “Honestly?” she answered. “Mostly I don’t know that either, but I suspect it at least partly involves being left alone. I guess I understand what you’re trying to do by making me take classes and eat my meals with the other students—get me back into a regular routine to provide structure, give me connections to people my own age, put me in situations that test me both to evaluate my reactions and rebuild my confidence and trust—but my mental compass has been shoved so far off true North that the needle is just endlessly spinning. I can’t regain confidence or trust when the sound of someone walking past my room makes me freeze like a deer in the headlights of a speeding car. Oh, and try not to pee myself, which I’m not always successful at. I’ve been putting towels down under the sheets of my bed to, uh, soak up…” She blushed. “But you should probably invest in a rubber mattress liner, and my laundry is at least double that of any of the other students, I’m willing to bet.”

            < _I’ll make sure I order the liner, >_ he said gently.

            “Other than that? I haven’t a clue. I can think of a couple things that _might_ help—I don’t know for sure if they would, but I don’t get all twisted up in knots when I think of them—so I think they might. At the very least, they wouldn’t make things worse.”

            < _What are they? >_ he asked, a touch of hope in his voice.

            “I dunno, I don’t want to ask for them because I don’t want anyone thinking I get special treatment because I’m your daughter. Quire clearly thought that, he called me ‘daddy’s girl’.”

            She could almost feel Xavier frown. < _Quire was not just wrong, he was deeply mistaken, as well. >_

            “What happened to him, anyway? Is he still running?” she asked, curious.

            < _Hardly. I sent Pietro after him to return him to the school, once I had located him. He didn’t get as far as he would have liked, only west to Pennsylvania, telepathically commandeering a car and driver. He is being detained. >_ She nodded. _< In any event, tell me what you think might help you and I will determine if it constitutes ‘special treatment’. I think the things that might help you heal of your emotional injuries are no more ‘special treatment’ than a cast and a crutch would be considered special treatment for a broken leg. You would not think it right if you were forced to drag yourself around on your hands and backside if you had that, would you?>_

            She laughed, hesitantly. “No, but I wouldn’t do that,” she said, with just the faintest tinge of humor. “I’d find some way to spontaneously manifest telekinesis as a secondary mutation, and levitate myself everywhere.”

            The sound of his mental laughter rang out, filling the telepathic landscape, and she smiled—first slowly, then a little more broadly.

            “So…uh.” She paused to collect her thoughts. “Ummm…I don’t know what sort of curfews you impose on the students, but I’d like to be able to visit the school library after it closes. Also, it’d put less of a strain on my anxiety if I could go back to taking my meals in my room. I expect the other students in my age group are going to have all sorts of questions about what Quire pulled, and I…just can’t handle that pressure right now.”

            < _I thought you were going to ask for special treatment? > _Xavier teased gently. _ <Those barely qualify.>_

            She chuckled, just once. “Let me think. Um…is there a way to test out of some of my classes and still get credit for them? I absorb everything in every book I so much as glance at, and I visit the library frequently. When I was first abducted, I was struggling with freshmen-level Spanish. Now I speak, read, and write fluent Spanish, German, French, Latin, Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Swahili, both modern and ancient Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Hindustani, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese. Same with math, and chemistry and geography, and calculus and physics. If I actually have to sit through classes in those subjects, I’ll fall asleep and flunk regardless of how well I know it.”

            _< I’ll talk to Hank and the teaching staff,> _he said, sounding intrigued. _ <We’re accredited, not just as a high school but as a university. You might be able to test yourself right out of classes and into several degrees, if you decided what you wanted to major in.>_

            She relaxed. Less homework and redundant classwork would reduce her stress levels considerably.

            < _I do have a small suggestion for you, which I think might help but which you are not obligated to take, >_ her father said.

            “What is it?” Lauren asked, only a little nervous. His patience had gone a long way toward reassuring her that he was going to try to work with her instead of merely issuing arbitrary orders. It wasn’t trust, not yet, but it could become the foundation for it, given time.

            < _Logan_ _is trained in numerous martial arts, including T’ai Chi, which is more of an exercise form, as I understand it. He also practices meditation. T’ai Chi requires no physical contact between teacher and student to learn, so he would not be touching you. I think it might be beneficial to learn the art, and how to meditate; it might go some way toward helping you to deal with your understandable and completely justified anger. Plus, knowing any martial art offers you the option to physically subdue an attacker, rather than killing him or her—and, I imagine, could be quite cathartic. >_

            She considered it. “Can I have a couple days to think about it?” she asked at last.

            < _Of course, >_ he said.

            “And will you ask him for me, ask him to teach me? I…” She flushed. “I just think it would be awkward if I asked.”

            Xavier’s mental doppelganger appeared in the room, at the foot of her bed, and he looked mildly amused. < _Because you have a crush on him? >_ he asked.

            “WHAT?!? No, I don’t—I mean, not with anybody, I—” Her face had gone hot as she blushed. “How could you even think that, with what I—”

            < _I am sure that even before your abduction, in high school, there was the occasional crush, Lauren, > _he said, smiling gently. _< It is a normal part of growing up, of being human, and it actually gives me hope. It strongly indicates that Creed did not manage to crush your spirit or heart with his vile abuse.>_

            “Daaaaddddd…” she muttered, the word slipping out of her.

            Xavier’s smile brightened to the wattage of a small sun. < _You have no idea how it makes me feel, to hear you call me that, > _he said, voice choked. _ <Even though you said it on accident, automatically, as it were.>_

            Lauren shifted uncomfortably where she sat. “Aannnnnd things just got awkward again,” she muttered. “Sorry, it’s going to be awhile—” she did not add ‘if ever’, because she was now willing to think that it was no longer a matter of ‘if’ but of ‘when’, “—before I’m ready to say it on purpose.”

            < _I do not mind, > _Xavier said serenely _. <Your love for me as a father is worth waiting for.>_

            She blushed again. “Thanks,” she murmured, very softly, and he nodded.

            < _I will leave you be, for now; give the idea of lessons with Logan some thought. If you do not wish to take your meals with the other students, you need not, just let me or one of the others know and someone will bring a tray to your room. >_

            “Thanks,” she said again, tongue-tied now by his kindness after how much she had shouted at him earlier. She remembered, vaguely, that this was how families were supposed to be, and that triggered another thought. “What about my mother?” she asked, looking pensive. “I mean, I figured that since she gave me up for adoption, she probably didn’t want me—I mean, I know she was a, uh, um…”

            < _One-night stand? > _he supplied helpfully, looking amused, and she blushed. < _I am sorry, my daughter, but I did that a lot when I was younger. It was the time of the sexual revolution, and I’m afraid your father was something of a slut. >_

            “Dad!” she blurted, going red, and he laughed.

            < _There, you see, I’ve surprised that word out of you twice now, > _he said. _ <I am looking into her location and status, but I fear it might take awhile.>_

            “That’s okay,” she said, almost relieved. “Two new parents might be too much to handle all at once. Better to do just one at a time, I think."

            He nodded. < _Get some rest, if you can, and if you want it. >_

            She grimaced. “I’m afraid there will be nightmares,” she admitted. “I had them almost every night while Creed still had me, except when I was so badly hurt that I was more comatose than asleep.”

            His image faded out of the room, and for a moment, she was afraid that she had somehow made him mad, but then she realized two things simultaneously: if he was mad, it wasn’t at her, and it was far more likely that he had faded out because he didn’t want her to see him cry.

After a moment, his mental voice rang out again, only a little hoarse. < _If you want, I can plant a subliminal telepathic command in your mind that will keep you from having any nightmares for the next few nights. I cannot keep them at bay forever, because they are part of the natural cycle of how the brain works through trauma, but a few nights won’t hurt. >_

“Please?” she asked plaintively, and his image appeared again. “I just…I get so little sleep, because of the dreams.”

He nodded, and came closer, around the side of the bed to be near her, though he obviously wasn’t present physically, and he didn’t bother to hide the tears glittering in his eyes this time.

_< Of course, my daughter,>_ he said, reaching out with one hand as if to brush his fingers against her brow, though she felt nothing tangible. She took a deep breath and dropped her mental shields, and he smiled. < _When next you sleep, and every time over the next four days, you will have only good dreams. No nightmares. Nothing to fear, >_ he said, and withdrew. < _I will give you some privacy now. >_ The look in his eyes was intense. < _I rather wish I could kill Creed myself, >_ he said. < _I love you, my child. >_

And he vanished.

 

—O—

 

She didn’t go to dinner with the other students that day, or the next, but after three days, Lauren did tell Xavier that she would at least make the attempt to take T’ai Chi and meditation lessons with Logan. Her father let her know that she could wear whatever comfortable clothes she wanted—sweats, pajamas—and to meet Logan in the back yard just past her French doors every morning half an hour past sunrise, starting the next day. She had groaned at that, because she was about as far from being a morning person as it was possible to be, but she refused to back out, and so the next morning, she found herself stepping out onto the dew-damp grass past her doors in a plain black t-shirt and a pair of grey sweatpants.

Logan was waiting there, clad in one of those white martial arts uniforms, including the jacket, which was tied shut with a plain white canvas belt. He nodded at her as she came forward skittishly, trying very hard not to think of what Xavier had said about how she felt about Logan. She was not doing a very good job of not swelling on it, and flushed.

“Mornin’, kid,” he said gruffly. “C’mon over an’ stand just at my side, about a yard away, so ya can see what I do an’ copy it.”

She nodded and stepped over to where he stood, lining herself up to the side of him, and stood as he stood. She had seen him doing these movements the first time she had seen him, thanks to her gift, threaded throughout his history all the way back to when he had first learned them, but she had never tried to copy them.

Slowly, patiently, and carefully as a veterinarian tending a baby bird with a broken wing, he walked her through the first five moves and stances of what he called the ‘short form’. Once she had figured out how to do the first stance/move to his satisfaction, he moved onto the second, then the third and fourth and fifth, showing her how to string them together in one smooth, continuous wave of motion. By the time she could perform those first five moves to his satisfaction, she understood why her father had wanted her to learn this. She had to concentrate, focusing fully on how she was moving her body, and that focus pulled her mind away from dwelling on the pain and emotional anguish of what Creed—and Quire—had done to her.

After they had practiced for an hour, he had her sit down in the grass—which had dried in the light of the rising sun—a few feet away and then ran through the complete routine twice. She watched in awe at the beauty and grace of his movements. It was like poetry, only performed with the body, not a trace of anger or violence in his steps despite the fact that T’ai Chi was originally created as a way to beat people up.

_Shit. Dad was right._

Her eyes went wide as she realized that Xavier had seen and understood her better than she had understood herself. She _did_ feel something for Logan, something she was completely unfamiliar with, and in that moment, as she blushed, she yanked her face down so he couldn’t see it, even though he could almost certainly smell the change in her mood, unless the wind was carrying her scent away from him rather than toward him.

When he had finished, he came back over and sat down across from her. It was going to be a scorcher that day, it was clear; even early as it was and how light the exercise had been, he was clad in a faint shimmer of sweat. The scent of him, even when he was what others might consider ‘dirty’—and he could probably have used a shower—was nothing like the stale, feral, grimy funk that clung to Creed, half decay and half fur. Logan’s scent was just musk and salt sweat, masculine but oddly clean.

“Ya ever meditated before?” he asked, dragging his legs into the lotus position with a volley of popping and crunching sounds.

“No, but when I looked at you, the first time, I could see how you do it, along with everything else in your life,” she said. She crossed her legs as he had, minus the sound of joints and metal-bonded bones protesting against old injuries and old age.

For the first time, he seemed flustered. “Everythin’?” he muttered, turning red to the tips of his ears.

She knew what he was thinking about. It was part of what inhibited her in making friends, or starting any sorts of relationships. People tended to view you differently once they realized that you had seem them every time they had sex, or masturbated, every time they used the toilet, every time they got drunk or stoned, every time they did something stupid, or cruel, or greedy, or cowardly. It was invasion of privacy only a little less extreme than reading a person’s mind…which she could also do.

“I’m sorry,” she said ruefully, hands knotting in her lap. “I don’t mean to, I just don’t have any way to prevent it, short of wearing a blindfold for the rest of my life.” Even tearing her eyes out wouldn’t work, since they would just grow back. “No one’s figured out a way for me to turn that power off yet.”

She had seen plenty of rough and violent images from his past, but for the most part, he had not initiated them. The same could not be said of Creed, when Quire had shoved her into the cell with him, and she had seen him for the first time with her gift unencumbered by the power-cancelling collar he had forced her to wear. There was more than one reason she had thrown up when she first got back to her room that day, and she had seen that she was not the first girl he had abducted and defiled, just—hopefully—the last.

“Eh…not yer fault, kid. I just feel bad ya had ta see all that. You been through more’n enough o’ that sorta thing from Creed ta have all my crap livin’ in yer head too,” he finally said.

“There’s no comparison at all between what you’ve done and what he has. Even the stuff you don’t remember…” She paused, considering. “I…would you _want_ to remember it all?”

He blinked, looking nonplussed. “Well…yeah. Even th’ bad stuff, ‘cause who knows what unexploded time bombs there are in my past, just waitin’ fer me ta trip over ‘em? But you said all those memories were scrambled an’ lost when Stryker shot me.”

“But I can see every single second of your entire life,” she pointed out, oddly pleased that the idea had occurred to her; that, after all the pain and grief her powers had caused, all the people who had been killed when they first manifested, she had found a way to use them to help someone. “I have all of that, and I’m a telepath. Everything that I saw that you saw, heard that you heard, felt that you felt, tasted that you tasted—I can put that all back into your head.”

His eyes went wide. “Jesus. And it’s the same for every person, every place, every _thing_ you lay eyes on?” he asked, looking dumfounded.

She nodded and blushed. “The first time I saw my father, part of what I saw was him…making me, with my mother.” She had gone as scarlet as a stop sign. “He was yelling her name.”

Logan burst out laughing, but sobered almost instantly. “Damn. I know ya ain’t seen much o’ the world an’ the people in it yet, but I’m still stunned ya can keep all that in yer head an’ not go crazy.”

She nodded quietly. “It’s…difficult. But the mind is almost infinitely flexible, I think. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the library the last few days, and I’ve absorbed almost all of the books in there. I’m running out of new languages to learn.” She laughed. “Did you want me to restore your memories, then?”

He pondered it. “I think…we maybe oughta talk t’ th’ Professor ‘bout this. An’ possibly Jean. I dunno how this might screw you up, kid—how long it could take, or how hard it’d be on ya. Might take an awful lotta energy an’ time. I think at th’ least, ya probably should have a big meal first, an’ yer old man monitoring the process.”

She nodded. “Then maybe we should go talk to him about it?” she suggested.

He sighed. “We didn’t get much meditatin’ done, did we?”” he asked as they got to their feet.

She shook her head, but she was smiling. “There’s always tomorrow,” she said, and they headed back into the mansion together.


	10. Full Circle to Find the Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next step in evolution?

_“No one is useless in this world_

_who lightens the burdens of another.”_

_― Charles Dickens_

_“A kind gesture can reach a_

_wound that only compassion can heal.”_

_― Steve Maraboli_

 

**Westchester, NY**

**Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters**

**Wednesday, June 15, 1983**

           

They found Xavier in his office, a cup of tea on his desk as he went over paperwork. He lifted his head as Logan knocked on the door frame, a smile blooming over his face. “Ah, good morning, come in!” he said cheerfully, gesturing to the two chairs in front of his desk. “I see you’ve finished your morning workout. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Logan closed the door behind them, and one of Xavier’s brows climbed high over his eyes. Lauren went to fling herself into one of the chairs with a more relaxed smile than usual, waiting for Logan to join her in the other chair before she spoke.

“I can give Logan back all his missing memories,” she said without preamble.

Xavier was reaching for his tea cup when she spoke, and his hand jerked forward and hit the cup, not knocking it over completely but sloshing some of the tea into the saucer that it sat on.

“What? Impossible!” he blurted, surprised. “I have tried restoring them myself, numerous times.”

She nodded, looking almost serene. “You tried restoring his memories from inside his head. The problem is, they aren’t in his head any more. When he was shot, the brain tissues healed, but the…energy structures, for lack of a better term—because as far as I understand it, nobody really understands how memories are stored in the brain, whether it’s neurochemical encoding in the cells and synapses, or energy structures, or something else—those structures were shattered, dispersed. They don’t exist in his mind any more.” She folded her fingers together.

“Then how are you going to…” his voice trailed off in bewilderment.

“People talk about the ‘historical record’, but it means a slightly different thing to me than it does for most. For most people, that’s just the term they use to refer to things that contain historical data—photos, books, newspapers, magazines, manuscripts, even sculpture and paintings and archaeological artifacts. Tree rings. Anything from a museum. But for me, when I say ‘historical record’, I’m referring to something completely different. I can see pieces of time in much the same way that I know—thanks to my gift—that Erik can see magnetic waves, or Ororo can see weather patterns. Think of it like—” she paused, groping for a good metaphor, “—oh, like the external databases that Hank uses to store backups of his data. It is a literal part of the temporal field that stores a record of everything that exists. As things stand now, I can’t freely access it; I can only access the life events of people I visually interact with, the places they’ve been or that I go, the things they did, the emotions they feel when things happen. Everything they’ve seen, smelled, heard, tasted, felt. The first time I laid eyes on Logan, I accessed that back-up copy of his life…and now I’m carrying a perfect copy of it around in my head. And I can transfer that to him.”

Xavier had listened with growing amazement, and at last, he switched his gaze to Logan. “And what do you think of this, Logan?” he asked.

Logan shifted in his chair. “I can’t say I wouldn’t like ta have my memories back, Professor. That said, the kid ain’t ever done this before. She only just realized she could. We don’t have any idea how difficult it could be, how hard on her, stuff like that. I’d feel like shit if she got hurt tryin’ ta help me.”

“I don’t _think_ the process should be harmful, any more than copying a file on the computer would be, but I’m willing to grant that it may be long, and possibly energy-intensive—which _could_ be dangerous if I didn’t have a healing factor,” Lauren admitted. “My thoughts are that it probably wouldn’t hurt to have you monitor the process, and to start out small at first so we can evaluate the effect it has on me—first a single memory. Then a minute, an hour, a day, and then a week, a month, a year.”

“You seem to have thought this through,” Xavier observed.

She winced. “Dad,” and she used the word deliberately, “I currently have the combined sum, in my head, of all the knowledge of you, Hank, Logan, Jean, Erik, Ororo, Kurt, Pietro, Scott, Creed, Raven, all the younger students, the school nurse, the mailman, the electric meter-reader, the pizza delivery guy—don’t order from that place any more, by the way, they don’t wear gloves when they make the food and the main cook has had a cold all last week and was wiping his runny nose on his sleeve and not washing his hands—and some 12-year-old boy who came into the far east edge of the grounds last night just around sunset, visible from my window, to chase the pop fly his brother knocked out of their yard. Nice kid. Name of Robert Allen. So I have all your degrees. All your skills. All your life experiences. Yeah, I thought it through. I have an excellent advisory council living in my head.” She made a face. “They, uh…talk to each other, you know. You and Erik like an old married couple.”

Logan barked out a single sharp laugh, and her father turned bright red. “Ah. I see,” he murmured, for lack of a better response. “I think I would like to get some readings on your gift before we start using it in this fashion, first. Specifically, I would like to bring in at least one more person you have not met, while you are wired up to a monitor array Hank is working on, and see what readings we get when you use your gift.”

For the first time, Lauren looked troubled. “I would really rather not do that. Please? I honestly don’t know if there is a finite amount of space in my head, and if there is, I don’t want to risk filling it up with ‘tests’. I just count myself lucky that this particular gift hadn’t really kicked in yet when my mental blasts and healing factor did. There were an awful lot of dead and unconscious people laying around for me to set eyes on. Also, I hear you emphasize all the time that reading another person’s mind without their permission and an authentic need to do so is both unethical and a huge invasion of privacy, but what I can do is every bit as invasive. It makes an entire non-physical copy of another person that lives in my head. Forever.” She frowned. “As nearly as I can tell, after my own analysis, is that there’s not any stress inherent in giving Logan his own memories back, but in possibly running out of storage space in my head. There’s a risk that could provoke a psychotic episode, though I don’t think it’s a very large risk. Somewhere around 20%, **_if_** running out of space is a thing that can happen, and I have no way to prove that, yet.”

Xavier grimaced. “That would definitely be an issue.” He pondered. “How about this? You use some of that duplicated information and write up a paper on it that you can share with Hank and I. Everything you’ve observed, everything you theorize, and especially anything that can be tested,” he said. “He and I will go over it. The data will help him develop the mechanism he needs to measure and test your gift.” He smiled. “He built the original Cerebro, you know.”

“I know,” she said. “When he was quite young. I have all the plans for it in my head, and I know how to build one myself." She shook her head. "I've never even so much as picked up a screwdriver before."

“In the meantime, I think it will probably not be too much of a strain to start the memory transfer tests as you suggest—with a single memory, while I monitor telepathically,” he finished.

Lauren’s face lit up. “When?” she asked eagerly.

“Hmmm…how tired are you?” Xavier asked.

She rolled her eyes like every teenager ever. “It’s only a little more than an hour after dawn, so the answer to that is ‘not very’. But I do think I should eat breakfast, first, as Logan suggested. Just like every other system in the body, the brain runs on calories. Something with a lot of carbs for energy, liquids, protein…I’m thinking waffles with syrup, bacon and sausage, OJ, coffee…” She smiled.

“An excellent idea,” Xavier agreed, and nodded at Logan. “So, then. Go shower and change clothes, then eat breakfast. Then meet me back here in my office at 9 AM. I will ask Hank to sit in, as well. It does not hurt to have another trained scientist observing the process.” He paused. “You will want to give some thought to which memory in particular you wish to transfer back to Logan.”

Lauren nodded and managed not to blush; the truth was, she had already made her choice. She had spent almost every night for the last two weeks ‘reading’ Logan’s memories—although ‘living’ them might have been a better term. The first night she had done so, she had woken from one of her nightmares about Creed, before Xavier had used his own abilities to help her with them, and she had desperately gone looking for anything sweet and gentle and noble and loving in her vast cache of stolen memories to take the pain and fear away, even though she knew that no memories of that sort would be meant for her.

She had found what she was looking for in Logan’s memories of his relationship with a woman named Silver Fox. The love and devotion, the tenderness Logan had displayed to the woman had been enough to take her breath—and her fear—away.

The woman had died, later on, killed by the same man whose bullets had destroyed Logan’s memories--Stryker--but she would hold back on sharing that with him, though she knew she would have to tell him she was dead—minus the awful details—beforehand to keep him from getting his hopes up.

She expected to receive a certain amount of shock over her choice of memories from both her father and Logan, to be sure. The specific memory she had picked was one of the many times Logan and Silver Fox had made love. It was so sweet and yearning and loving—so utterly unlike anything Creed had ever done to her, that the first time she had ‘lived’ it, she had ended up sobbing in mirrored love and mingled grief and—as much as she hated to admit it—envy.

Dead or not, Silver Fox had been a very fortunate woman.

“I’m going to go shower and change now, then,” she said mildly, rising from the chair. “I’ll be back after breakfast.”

“We’ll see you then,” her father said, and as she headed out the door, she heard Xavier speak to Logan.

“It looks like the martial arts and meditation were a good idea,” he said. “She seems much more stable and less depressed. I was worried.”

“Chuck, you ain’t got no idea—” Logan said gruffly, but at that point, the office door closed behind her, ending the rest of his sentence.

_Well_ , she supposed, _I’m sure my scent changed when I thought about that memory of him and Silver Fox._ A wave of frustration rippled through her. _Lots of girls my age have boyfriends, have relationships, and it’s not a bad thing. But with what Creed did to me, I was sure I was never going to ever want anything to do with all that. Is it a bad thing that I was so obviously wrong? I don’t even know if I would ever want…sex. But…it would be nice to hold hands. Or to sit on the couch in his arms._

_Oh, who am I kidding?_ she thought. The likelihood of even sharing a couch with him, much less holding hands or hugging, was slim to none. It wasn’t that she thought he might have a partner already; she knew, thanks to her gift, that he did not.

But he was madly in love with Jean Grey.

That would have been bad enough on its own, but Jean did not return his feelings. Instead, she was in love with Scott. So Logan was stuck yearning for someone who was never, ever going to feel the same for him, and that was impossible to compete with. So long as he was fixated on an impossible dream, he would never consider anyone else.

But it was nice to dream, nice to peruse his memories like a borrowed library book and wish that the women in them—the few that stood out—were her.

She reached her quarters, showered, washed and dried her hair, and changed into a fresh pair of jeans and a clean blue t-shirt. She ran a brush through her hair, then stared at herself in the mirror for a moment, trying to remember what this simple ritual had felt like when she was 13. Her father then had said she couldn’t wear make-up until she turned 14, but she had experimented at friends’ houses during sleepovers or visits after school. She sort of remembered Molly and Andrea and Juliet showing her how to put it on—eyeshadow and lip gloss and mascara. She peered into the mirror. Her skin was clean enough—thanks to her healing factor routinely killing off the bacteria that caused acne—that she didn’t really need foundation or cover-up or blush.

Of course, she knew Logan—thanks to her gift—better than to think that make-up would change his ‘no’ to a ‘yes’. He didn’t care about surface appearances, and his sense of honor would very likely ever keep him from laying a finger on ‘the Professor’s daughter’, even if, by some miraculous chance, he fell out of love with Jean. He respected her father too much.

She sighed and threw her towel at the mirror in frustration, then picked it up off the floor, hung it up to dry, and put her shoes on before heading out of her room to the dining room to have breakfast.

Her nervousness at sitting down to eat with her fellow classmates lasted only until she saw that there was only one other person in the dining room—Erin, the water controller. The elementalist was the quietest of the other students her age, and didn’t tend to join the chatter at the table. She glanced up as Lauren sat down in her usual chair further down the table, nodded, and re-buried her head in the book she was reading.

Covered platters and tureens of hot food—various types of eggs, bacon, potatoes, pancakes, sausage and waffles, fruit, oatmeal—covered the table, and boxes of cold cereal, and milk and tea and coffee. Lauren filled her plate up, poured herself coffee, and began the process of mowing her way through the meal, savoring every morsel.

When she had finished, she carried her dishes over to the cart near the conveyer belt into the kitchen and disposed of them, then headed back to her father’s office.

The door to Xavier’s office stood open, and she peeked inside. Her father was seated behind his desk still, and he looked up with a pleased smile as she poked her head in. Hank sat opposite him, both of them looking at her expectantly, and in that second, both her desire and her courage deserted her, and as she gave them a tentative smile back, she sorted frantically through Logan’s saved memories, searching for something less bold to give him back. The idea of her father—at minimum—and possibly Hank, as well, watching her share such an intimate moment with Logan made her insides clench in anxiety.

“And how was breakfast?” Xavier asked.

“Fine. Quiet, even though I didn’t take it in my room,” she said. “Erin was there, but she doesn’t talk much.” She chose a memory—Logan, standing with Silver Fox in the front yard of their mountainside cabin, her standing in front of him, and his arms around her lovingly. Still tender, still gentle, but not something that would make her father stare at her in appalled shock.

The door pushed open behind her as she sank into the other chair, and Logan stepped in, a wary look on his face as he took in the three of them.

“Mornin’,” he said gruffly. “Hank.” He nodded at them. “Guess we’re doin’ this, then.”

“That is always your choice, Logan,” Xavier said calmly. “If you have changed your mind—”

Lauren’s heart wrenched in her chest at the thought, but he shook his head. “Just ain’t sure what t’ expect,” he said, dragging over another chair and setting it next to hers.

“Ummm…so basically, I’m going to make a copy, a _perfect_ copy, of a memory of yours in my head. Then I’m going to transfer it to your head. There should be a proper place in your mind for every memory ever created. When you were shot, the brain tissue was temporarily sundered, and the memories were lost. Think of a string of pearls. If you break the string, the pearls all fall off—but create a new string and you can re-string them all. Each memory fits into its proper place, and the other, related memories fit in around them—like how puzzle pieces fit together, and you can’t force the wrong pieces to fit in the wrong spot.” She paused. “I picked a …good memory, something nice, for the first one. There’s plenty of traumatic memories in here, but I didn’t want to start with you with pain.”

He looked at her oddly, then nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “I ‘preciate that, kid.”

“In the future, assuming this goes well—which I know it will—and assuming that I’m allowed to continue, which I know is not certain, I’ll use this memory as a core, and build outward from it to create a matrix. Everything is connected to everything else, if you know how to look at it.”

“I didn’t teach you that, my daughter,” Xavier said.

“No, I figured it out on my own,” she said.

Xavier smiled proudly. “And it is correct,” he said, pleased.

“I have an apparatus I have been working on, to measure and record what’s going on as you work,” Hank said to her. “Much like Cerebro, but much more narrowly tailored. If I may…?” he asked.

She grimaced, more than a little nervous, but nodded. He got up from his chair, carrying a little box, and stepped over to where she sat, opening it. Inside was a small mesh cap, studded with circuitry, attached to several electrical cords that led to a small diagnostic array inside the box. She sat rigid while he placed the cap on her head, adjusting it carefully; the fur, fangs, and claws reminded her more than a little of Creed, though the fact that he was blue went a long way towards keeping her calm. Still she held her breath until he was done and stepped away; fortunately, he was competent and efficient, and did not take very long.

“Okay, so how do we do this?” Logan asked.

“You don’t have to do anything,” Lauren reassured him. Hank switched on his apparatus.

“Lauren, with your permission?” Xavier asked.

She nodded, trying not to be tense. _He already knows I have a…a ‘crush’ on Logan. There’s nothing for him to see in my head that he doesn’t already know_ , she thought. “Yes, that’s fine, come on in,” she sighed, lowering her mental shields for him. She felt him slide into her thought almost instantly, despite the fact that he was trying to be inconspicuous.

“Your telepathic sensitivity is very acute,” he observed aloud.

“Yes, well,” she murmured, not sure how to respond to that.

“I am ready when you are, Lauren,” Xavier said gently, well aware of her nervousness.

“As am I,” Hank agreed.

“Good ta go,” Logan said tersely.

She closed her eyes. She had not done this before, yet somehow she knew how, just as her body automatically knew how to breathe: envisioning her mind, the telepathic part of her brain like a pair of hands. She ‘picked up’ the memory she had chosen, feeling it copy itself, and ‘carried’ it as her mind slipped into Logan’s. She was careful, as she searched for exactly the right niche for that memory, the exact ‘shape’ for that particular puzzle piece.

It took only a few seconds to find, as if that empty place in his heart and mind cried out to be filled again, and she slid that memory into his mind, feeling as it merged once again with his memory matrix. There were no connecting memories around it, but his mind recognized it as valid, nonetheless.

He made a soft sound, a grunt, as if he had been punched in the gut, and she opened her eyes in time to see the tears begin to roll down his cheeks. She withdrew from his mind without a word, averting her eyes away, only for her gaze to fall on her father’s face and realize that he, too, was crying. She flushed and turned to look at Hank, who was—as nearly as she could tell, him not being telepathic—a safe place to rest her eyes.

“Thanks, kid,” Logan said hoarsely. She understood why he was crying; it was not just the sights and sounds and other sensory impressions that went with the memory, but all he had been feeling when it happened, all his emotions—and she well knew how intense and overwhelming the love that had been in his heart had been at that moment.

“That was lovely, Lauren,” Xavier said quietly.

“Kid, I gotta ask, is she…” Logan faltered.

She winced. This was the hard part. “I’m afraid not. I’m sorry,” she said softly, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Tell me I wasn’t the one that—” his words trailed off.

She blinked in surprise. Of everything she might have guessed about how he’d react, that one had not even crossed her radar. “You?” she blurted. “No, Logan, you didn’t kill her.” She hesitated. “The man who shot you, Stryker, the one who scrambled your memories, he killed her a couple minutes later.”

His expression hardened. “Is he still alive?” he asked.

She hesitated. “I…don’t know. Not for sure.” She made a face. “It…um…I don’t know for sure how to explain it, but…”

“But what?” he demanded.

She bit her lip and glanced at Xavier. She reached out to her father with her mind.

_< He has…two conflicting sets of memories. Things that happened at the same time.>_

_< Ah, that,>_ her father responded, his tone understanding. “Hank, if you’re finished with your measurements, could you give us a moment?”

“Of course, Charles,” Hank said. He rose from his seat and took the measuring cap from Lauren’s head; she sat still and patient as he did so, coiling up the wires and putting them away. “I’ll analyze the readings and let you know when I have hard data for you.”

“Thank you, Hank,” Xavier said amiably. He waited until Hank had left, shutting the door behind him, before he turned back to Lauren and Logan.

“Lauren is uncertain whether Stryker is dead because she can see the two different sets of memories from the diverging timelines from when you went back in time,” he explained to Logan.

Lauren blinked. “Time travel?” she blurted. It instantly gave a logical explanation for the two different memory sets, but she was more than a little surprised to learn it was possible.

“Ah,” Logan said. “Ya think you’d be able ta sort ‘em out fer me, kid?” he asked.

“Yes?” she said hesitantly. “But not immediately, I’m afraid. It’d take more in-depth study of the memory matrix, following both time threads out from the core.”

“How long, ya think?” he asked, his tone urgent.

“Logan—” Xavier began, but she shook her head.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t mind. If I can be useful this way, I don’t mind spending extra time to—” An idea occurred to her and she fell silent, frowning.

“Kid?” Logan asked instantly.

“Lauren?” Xavier said, his tone a bit more worried than Logan’s.

“Sorry, just thinking,” Lauren said. “Something occurred to me, actually. When I look at someone, I see everything, everywhere, and everyone they’ve ever seen, because I’m looking not at someone’s thoughts but at their history—at time, in other words. Well, everything in time is connected, right? Past to present to future is a never-ending continuum. So I look at Logan’s history, and I see the person who killed Silver Fox, and they’re linked by time—quite a lot, to be honest, he recurs frequently. So if I reach out with my gift, **_through_** Logan’s history to Stryker’s existence—” she was doing it even as she was explaining it to them, “—then I—”

Even as she reached for the history of William Stryker, she heard her father’s shout, and then everything went white behind her eyes and she was falling.


	11. We Make Our Own Future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just when Lauren thinks she might have a handle on how the world works, things change.

_“Anytime we step out boldly to make changes,_

_we take a chance that we might fail._

_But the only way to get better is to try.”_

_\--Joyce Meyer_

 

**Westchester, NY**

**Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters**

**Friday, June 17, 1983**

           

Lauren could see it, the entire existence of William Stryker, but there were two divergent timelines, just as there were with Logan—only one was blurred, pale, washed out like a painting that had been left out in the rain. She realized at once that this was the timeline that had been overwritten, destroyed; Logan had memories of both timelines, but Stryker had only the memories of the current, existing timeline.

The other thing was the pain. It raked at her like a vulture’s talons, tearing at her brain ruthlessly, and she understood almost instantly that this was something she was not ready for yet, not so soon; Time was a vast beast, no doubt with uncountable alternate timelines, and she was not yet strong enough to juggle more than one at a time, much less leap to the existence of a person who was not within line of her sight through the history of another person.

She hung on tenaciously, ignoring Stryker’s faded alternate existence, and followed the true, current line through time from where the two had diverged to its ending in the now, fixing in her mind his whereabouts.

Then she tore her mind away from him, shoving herself back out of the stream of time, back into her own body as she woke.

Her head pounded like a hammer against an anvil as she peeled her eyes open blearily. Her nasal passages and throat were dry as old sand from the Gobi Desert, and every inch of her body hurt, even with her healing factor. She looked around slowly, only with her eyes, aching, and realized she was neither in her father’s office or her room, but in the school infirmary, crisp sheets tucked up to mid-chest, a cannula in her nostrils hissing oxygen, and an IV in her right hand.

“Lauren?” her father’s voice was full of simultaneous worry and relief. She recognized his voice but did not turn her head to look at him; she had the idea that would have hurt far too much to do so. “How do you feel?”

“Ow,” she whimpered, and winced. “Like I turned my brain inside-out. I don’t think I was ready for the advanced stuff just yet.”

He frowned. “I don’t understand completely what it is that you tried to do,” Xavier said.

“Time touches everything, contains everything,” she rasped. “Um…can I have some water? Throat is dry, but I don’t think it’d be a good idea to switch to telepathy just yet.”

He poured a glass for her and gingerly helped her to sit up just enough to drink in tiny sips. “How long was I out, anyway?” she asked as he eased her back down.

“Two days,” he said worriedly.

“Fuck!” The word was shocked out of her, a little bit of Logan’s influence, perhaps, still lingering in her subconscious.

“Language,” he reproved, then shook his head. “Never mind. We thought you were dead, at first. You keeled over, bleeding from your nose and ears. You didn’t move, and Logan couldn’t detect any life signs at first. He blamed himself…he knows you, eh, like him, and were clearly going above and beyond the call of duty to please him…”

Her face went scarlet. “Oh, hell,” she muttered. “I was just…I figured out another way to use my gift, but…I wasn’t ready for that, yet. I can do it, but it’s much, much harder on my mind and body than I realized it would be.”

“So what _did_ you do? You said ‘time touches everything’ but you didn’t explain further,” he said.

“So…imagine you were reading someone’s thoughts and you saw that they’d seen someone commit a murder,” she said, resting back against her pillow. “They didn’t know who the murderer was—say the murderer was a stranger. But they got a really good look at the killer.” He listened intently. “But _you_ could telepathically scan the world until you spotted that person.” She picked her words carefully. “You couldn’t reach directly through that first person’s thoughts to find the killer, but you could use their thoughts as a…a tool, to help find them. I did, um, something like that. Minds don’t touch other minds, unless you’re a telepath. But time touches time. I reached out through Logan’s personal timeline to when it connected with Stryker,  and then I leapfrogged from a point in Logan’s personal history, when he was with Stryker, **_to_** Stryker’s history. I used Logan’s history like a stepping stone in a rover, and hopped to the next ‘stone’, which was the Stryker’s history. Then I followed _his_ history from the past to where he is in the here and now.” Very carefully, she sifted through her mind, her memories, taking inventory. “Huh. The memory duplicate of the kid who came into our back yard is gone. I don’t know if it’s because my storage space is finite, and that was the most recent record and Stryker’s history overwrote it, or if it was just wiped away from the damage done to my brain by over-reaching. Logan lost his memories originally because of physical damage to his brain tissue. I can’t say that I’m not susceptible to the same thing. I need to be careful.”

“Yes, you do,” he said, frowning anxiously. “We can do some tests, see how badly damaged your mind is…”

She shook her head. “Probably a waste of time. By the time you had everything set up, I’d probably be healed. My headache is almost gone already.” She hesitated. “How is Logan doing? With the memory, I mean.”

His expression mellowed. “I have not noticed a great change in him, only a little one. In the two days that you’ve been unconscious…I haven’t seen him moping around Jean as much.” He glanced at her meaningfully.

Lauren blinked. “There’s something I hadn’t anticipated,” she muttered. _Oh, great,_ she mused. _It was bad enough when he was fixated on a living woman who was out of his reach. How do I compete with a ghost?_

It was a rhetorical question, of course. The answer was right there for her, if she could make herself cruel enough to do it. Because she had the whole of his history in her head, and she knew the truth. Silver Fox had been working for Stryker all along. For relatively noble reasons—to save her sister, who Stryker was holding prisoner—but their entire relationship was built on a lie, even if she did come to eventually love him.

All that she had to do to destroy his fixation on her was make sure that the next memory he got was of the moment that he learned that.

And she knew that she couldn’t do it. No matter how much she wanted him to look at her the way he looked at Silver Fox, or at Jean. She couldn’t be that cruel, that mercenary, that heartless, even if it meant that he would never look at her that way.

That memory of his would be the last one she gave back to him, right after the one of him killing the man who was his real father. Right after the one where he saw the man he believed to be his father, dead on the floor.

She eased herself up into a sitting position, wincing, but already the pain she felt was much less than it had been when she had woken. She said a silent prayer for her healing factor and then took a deep breath.

“I think I’m going to be fine,” she said quietly. “I could stand to eat, and then go back to my quarters to shower and get into regular clothes.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “If the tests Hank did were fine, and I promise not to jump from history to history again, I’d like to proceed to the next step in restoring Logan’s memory—a minute, maybe an hour. Again, with you monitoring it.”

“Not before tomorrow, at the soonest—yes, I know that is disappointing,” he said in response to her sigh, “but I have a duty to make certain you have truly recovered, both as father and teacher,” he said. “A day is little enough time to let your healing factor finish the job.”

“Fine,” she murmured, trying very hard not to sulk. “I’ll write up that paper you asked me for.”

“Excellent idea, and it shouldn’t require much in the way of exertion on your part,” he replied with a smile. “Do you want your meal here, or in your room, or in the dining room with the others? It’s almost lunch time.”

“In my room, I think?” she said. She paused. “Also, this might be a weird question, but when do folks get code names around here?”

He laughed. “There’s no real set time. We might suggest a name in keeping with the nature of their powers when a student first joins us, or later on if nothing occurs to us right away. Sometimes a student comes to us already knowing what they want to be called. Unless the name they choose is wildly inappropriate for some reason, we generally try to accommodate them in their wishes. Why, did you think of a name you liked?”

She nodded. “Some of my old friends when I was younger used to shorten my first name to ‘Laure’, pronounced L-O-R-E. Lore is a reasonably apt word to describe what I learn when I see something or someone new and tap into the historical record,” she explained. “It seemed to fit.”

“Clever,” he said approvingly. “And yes, apt. I’ll make a note in your file.”

She beamed at him. The longer she was around him, the more she could relax in his presence and the more she found herself trusting him, even though it was probably still largely unconscious.

A thought occurred to her and she counted backward, numbering the days in her had that had passed since Quire’s stunt with Creed. It had been several days, almost a week, and she looked at Xavier warily. “Is Creed still here?” she asked nervously.

He shook his head. “He has been removed. I called in a special favor and had him transferred some place that could contain him.”

She arched a brow. “I thought you said there was nowhere?” she asked.

“As I said, I called in a special favor,” he said calmly. “I can’t really discuss it further. If you want, though, I will be happy to go down to that level with you and show you his empty cell.”

She shuddered. “No thank you,” she said. “I believe you.” She pushed the sheets back, testing her limbs, pulling the oxygen tube out of her nostrils before untaping the IV and extracting it from her hand. The small puncture would closed up before their eyes.

She swung her legs cautiously over the side of the bed, waiting to see if there was pain, but none came. Xavier regarded her fondly.

“You know, you should probably wait for the school nurse to check you out of the infirmary,” he pointed out.

“Probably,” she agreed. “But I didn’t, so…”

He shook his head and chuckled. “Go, then,” he said. “I’ll let her know you’ve gone. I’ll have a tray sent to your room.”

“Thanks…dad,” she said carefully. “There, see? On purpose this time. And not sarcasm.”

He smiled. “Worth waiting for,” he repeated from a few days ago. “I’ll see you later, Lauren—and I expect that report by the end of the week.”

She snorted as she let her bare feet brush the floor and got carefully out of bed, making sure her legs would support her before nodding and heading out of the infirmary.

Her room was exactly as she had left it, and by the time she had showered and changed, Kitty was knocking at her door with a tray for lunch. The smells of pot roast with gravy, loaded backed potatoes, tea with cream and sugar, a salad, and a slice of cherry pie—still hot from the oven—filled the room.

“Thanks,” Lauren said shyly.

“You okay?” Kitty asked hesitantly. “Folks were worried.”

“Folks?” Lauren asked carefully.

“Most of us,” Kitty said. “You’ve been through a lot and Quire is a jerk, we’re all glad he’s gone.”

Lauren blushed, but managed a nod, more than a little tongue-tied. She had no idea how much they knew, only that she didn’t really want to discuss it.

“And then you were in the infirmary for two days,” Kitty exclaimed, possibly picking up on her discomfort. “What happened?”

That was less embarrassing ground. “I pushed my powers too far and blew a fuse in my brain,” Lauren said. “But I got better. Healing factors are great, everyone should have one.”

“I **_wish_**!” Kitty laughed. “I twisted my ankle really bad when I went ice-skating last winter and I was on crutches for over a week.” She made a face. “Anyway, I’ll leave you to eat before your food gets cold. Hope you’re back with us for breakfast soon!” She grinned and waved and headed back down the hall.

Lauren shut the door and carried her tray over to her desk where she had just fired up her word processor to start typing up her paper for Xavier, which was already at least half written in her head.

She was halfway through her lunch and three-quarters of the way through her paper when a massive explosion rocked the mansion, the roar enough to shatter her eardrums and leave her temporarily deaf.

The school’s foundations rocked, throwing her out of her chair even as part of the ceiling collapsed, raining down bricks and shattered chunks of timber and pieces of mortar and stone. Lauren threw an arm up overhead with a dizzy cry of fragments of masonry showered down like baby meteors; one bounced off the back of her head hard enough to draw blood and she yelped.

She cast her mind outward, searching for other thought patterns.

She found more than a few, almost instantly, all the younger students except Quire, plus the school staff—the nurse, the kitchen staff. Jean, Ororo, and Raven were nowhere to be found, nor her father and Hank, but she sensed Logan in his quarters—alarmed and angry—and Scott and Kurt in the game room. There was no trace of either Pietro—who, with his power, could be just about anywhere on the planet, literally—or Erik, whom she suspected had probably left a few days ago; she knew from his mental duplicate in her head that he was not a permanent resident there at the school.

Far, far more worrisome was the fact that there were more minds moving through the school that she did not recognize, minds that glowed dark with hostility, people—other mutants—that carried weapons and plotted harm.

She reached out with her thoughts and touched Logan’s mind. < _Logan, I truly apologize for invading your mind like this, but there are intruders, armed mutants, in the school. The explosion was not a gas line bursting or any other kind of accident. >_

_< How __many, kid? >_ Logan thought tersely. She almost melted in relief at how quickly he took charge of the situation.

_< At least nine… **maybe** ten? There’s one bunch of thoughts that’s…slippery, hard to get hold of. Two women, seven men, one unknown. I can’t sense my father, Hank, Raven, Ororo, or Jean anywhere on the grounds. Kurt and Scott are in the game room, but Scott is unconscious and Kurt is freaking out. The younger students are scattered throughout the school, and I think Kitty is phased and Erin is in water form, because my sense of their thoughts is…fuzzy. >_

_< Good for them. Harder fer th’ assholes who broke in ta get ‘em that way,>_ he responded. There was reluctance in the tone of his mental voice when he focused his thoughts for her again. _< Kid, I hate ta ask it, I know ya been through an ungodly amount o’ shit lately, but I gotta ask ya ta step upta the plate here an’ help, help me keep track’a these bozos an’ take ‘em out. With Chuck out—he an’ Hank went to a talk on genetics in Manhattan, an’ the ladies from th’ senior team went ta the mall in Westchester—I ain’t got no one here aside you who can do the job but Quire.>_

_< Quire?> _she asked, frowning.

< _Chuck stuck him in Creed’s old cell, fer now_ ,> Logan responded.

_I should have guessed,_ Lauren thought, resigned, but at the moment, she couldn’t find it in herself to be angry. _< Yeah, I’ll do what I can. What do you want me to do?>_

_< I need th’ locations o’ all th’ younger students, an’ I need ya ta meet up with me so I can keep an eye on you, ‘cause Chuck will melt my brain if I drag you into this an let ya get hurt.>_

_< I know where you are_,> she said, far more bravely than she felt. _ <I need to put shoes on, there’s broken glass everywhere—eh, never mind, healing factor. I’ll be right there.>_

_< Take the 30 seconds ta get yer shoes on, kid,> _he said sternly. _ <An’ anyone ya see an’ don’t recognize on the way here, use yer mind zap an’ take ‘em out.>_

Her stomach was churning as she pulled on a pair of gym shoes and headed out the door. All she could think of as she slunk through the halls toward where she sensed Logan’s thoughts were the moments after she had left her high school, five years ago, and had been chased by the men in military uniforms, shot with tranq darts, and woken up in Creed’s ‘custody’. She had used her temporal gift days ago to examine her own timeline and realized that the ‘soldiers’ that Creed had slaughtered to claim her were all Stryker’s forces.

“Well, look what we have here,” a voice sneered as she reached the dining room. She whipped her head around in time to see a man—Asian, brunette, a cruel expression on his face—so close she had no time to duck as he reached out and grabbed the side of her face.

A supernova went off behind her eyes, purple-white, and she screamed.

Dimly, she heard her attacker scream, too.

She fell to her hands and knees, gagging and panting, her head feeling like a door had opened at the core of it and anything at all could come rushing through it at any time, from a T-Rex to a WWII Panzer tank.

“What did you do to Scrambler, bitch?” The voice was cold and cutting, and she looked dizzily up from the floor to see another stranger standing in the dining room doorway. He carried a harpoon in his hands, and looked vaguely Native American or Asian—maybe Eskimo. He was short, but bulky, built along likes similar to Logan.

“I don’t know!” Lauren cried, reaching for the nearest wall to get to her feet. She could no longer feel the minds of anyone around her, nor see anything of the man’s historic record, and she noted blood seeping sluggishly from a cut on the palm of her hand where she had fallen on glass, which meant her healing factor wasn’t working, either.

The ‘Scrambler’ person he spoke of—the Asian who had touched her, she assumed—was nowhere to be seen.

“Then you’re useless,” the man with the harpoon snarled, and drew his arm back to hurl it at her.

Before she could scream, he did, as three sharp blades burst out of the front of his chest in a spray of blood, thrust through him from behind, and then he tottered forward off them and fell face-forward onto the floor in a rapidly-spreading pool of blood and did not move.

“Kid?” Logan said, stepping forward.

She let out a relieved sound, climbing to her feet, but as he stepped forward, she threw out a hand in warning. “Don’t touch me!” she told him, trying to get her breath, and that huge hole was still gaping wide in the center of her mind. For a moment, she wondered if this was just what it felt like to be without mental shields, but she knew better.

“Wasn’t gonna,” he said, shaking his head. “You okay?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.” She gave him a terrified look. “My powers are gone.”

The look on his face was as if someone had kicked a baby, mingled loss and fury.

“What happened?” he asked, waving her over to his side.

So she told him about the man that had touched her. He frowned. “An’ he just vanished?” he asked as they hurried through the halls to try to collect the other students. She nodded. “An’ the guy I killed called ‘im ‘Scrambler’?”

“Yeah,” she answered. “As I don’t physically look like scrambled eggs after he touched me, I assume he scrambled my powers.”

“Shit,” Logan muttered. “Ya can’t get hurt, not even a little bit, if ya ain’t gonna heal like usual.” We reached the door to the game room, but it was blocked by one of the fallen ceiling timbers. Logan swore and motioned for me to stand back so he could try to move it out of the way. Greater than human strength was not one of his powers, but given that his bones were all bonded with adamantium, he could use his arms and legs as a lever without worrying that his bones would break under the strain. His muscles, tendons, and ligaments might tear, but thanks to his healing factor, they would heal in record time—minutes, even seconds, depending on the severity of the injury.

She stayed well back, out of his way, afraid to bump into him or trip and fall against him or touch him in any way. She had no idea what had happened to Scrambler, except that it was probably bad. She checked the cut on her hand. It had started to clot, and would eventually scab over, healing at the same rate as any normal human being. Her healing factor had clearly been scrambled—and so, judging by the fact that she could neither read minds nor the historical record--were her other powers. She was less certain about her psychic blasts, but given that they, like reading minds, were a part of her telepathy, she guessed that they would not work, either.

But when Scrambler had touched her, he had disappeared.

That didn’t mean her _powers_ had disappeared, or nothing would have happened to him at all. So _his_ power was not to cancel out the powers of others completely, but to make them work in different ways.

It might be possible to use that, she thought, if she could figure out how his power had reconfigured hers.

To begin with, his power had made her power make him vanish. But had he actually vanished? She thought it unlikely; that implied either instant total disintegration, or teleportation. None of her powers, even altered, seemed likely to work that way; furthermore, if he had been disintegrated, it seemed likely that there would have been ash or some other residue, and there was none.

“Hey,” Logan said, interrupting her calculations. “Get over here, on th’ far end o’ this timber. It keeps slipping. I just need ya ta hold it where it is long enough er me ta get my fingers under it ta move it.”

“Okay, just be really careful not to touch me,” she warned him, and stepped to the farthest end of the fallen tinder from him, the spot where he had pointed, and reached down to brace it in place.

As soon as her bare hands touched the ancient, rough-grained wood beam, it writhed under her touch. She jerked her hands back, but it was too late as the timber shivered. And then little twigs began to poke out of the hewn oak, and tiny green buds emerged from the end of each twig, unfurling into baby leaves.

“Shit!” Logan rasped, his eyes wide. “What’d you do?”

“Nothing on purpose,” she said, “but I think this is because of how Scrambler messed up my powers. Somehow, touching it…I think I either shifted it back down the personal timeline of the tree this beam came from, restoring it to life, or I temporarily filled it with…well, time, for lack of a better explanation.” She chewed on her lower lip. “Which means I don’t think I killed Scrambler. But…” she hesitated. “You said you went back in time. I think I might have done the same thing to him, except I have no idea how to get him back. Or where he went. Or I could have sent him forward, and that’s even worse.”

He shook his head. “Chuck’s gonna flip his lid,” he muttered.

“If I could still _see_ time, I could figure out where he went,” she added. “I’m just hoping he ended up in the late Cretaceous and got eaten by something reptilian, rather than ending up just a few years into the past where he can do some real damage and change the timeline.”

“Shit, that’d be bad,” he agreed. “Also, remind me not to piss you off.” He flashed her a wry smile.

He extended his claws and she watched as he just slashed the beam in half. The two pieces fell away to either side and he shoved the double doors to the game room open with his shoulder.

Kurt was there, looking panicked and then relieved as he saw them. Scott was laid out on the floor, an ugly bruise on the right corner of his brow, a trickle of tacky drying blood seeping into his hairline. His ruby quartz glasses still sat on his face.

“Ach, thank Gott,” Kurt exclaimed. “Vhat happened? Ve vere playing table tennis and then the roof fell in. A chunk fell from the ceiling and knocked him out, but I don’t think he is seriously hurt. There does not seem to be a skull fracture, unless it is a tiny hairline crack, but I did not think it a good idea to move him vhile he vas hurt.” His gaze flicked to Lauren, to the blood on her face and in her hair. “You are hurt, _fraulein_!” He frowned. “But your healing factor…”

“The school is under attack, elf,” Logan said.

“Some jerk touched me and messed up my powers,” Lauren said. “My healing factor isn’t working. Fortunately, it’s nowhere near as bad as I’ve been hurt in the past.”

“Ugh,” Scott muttered groggily from the floor. “The roof broke. Not my fault.”

“Nah,” a harsh voice came from behind them. “It was us.”

 


	12. The Seeds of Our Destiny

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this is what it's like, living with the X-Men. You can always tell where they've been by the trail of destruction they leave behind.

_“If you know the enemy and know yourself_

_you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.”_

_\--Sun Tzu_

 

**Westchester, NY**

**Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters**

**Friday, June 17, 1983**

           

Lauren whirled, even as she caught sight of Logan’s expression going dark with rage.

There was a group of seven people blocking off the doorway to the game room, two women and five men. One of the women—tall, muscular, in a light blue costume, with short purple hair, was dragging Husk along behind her by the hair. Lauren’s classmate was clearly unconscious. One of the men, just as massive, had Beak and Anole each thrown over a shoulder.

There was a man who looked as if he was composed of living crystal, and a woman with green hair dressed in a green-and-white bodysuit. A man with long, straight grey hair, dressed in a silvery uniform; and finally an older man, Native American by the look of him, with long black hair and a thick mustache; his uniform was studded with mechanized components, attached by hooks—gun barrels and handles, wiring, small monitors and scanners, everything.

“I’ll only say this once,” the last man said. “Where’s Quire?”

I blinked in surprise, even as Kurt and Scott looked confused. Logan snarled.

“They’re gonna play dumb, Scalphunter,” the crystalline man laughed. “I have dibs on the kid with the glasses.”

“Shut it, Prism,” the older man—Scalphunter—said. He looked at Scott and Kurt, then me, then Logan. “Last chance.”

“Fuck you,” Logan snarled, claws still popped, and launched himself at the man.

All hell broke loose.

The man with the long grey hair and silvery costume began to spin at hypersonic speeds on his toes, becoming a blur, and knives and blades shot out from the cyclone he made, hitting the walls and furniture and people that hadn’t ducked—not his teammates—and embedded deep. Lauren heard Kurt howl in pain, even as Scott yanked up his glasses and the thick, crackling beam of scarlet energy stabbed into the center of the attacking group. The muscular woman dropped Husk and the massive man threw Beak and Anole down to the floor in the instant before the beam hit them.

The green-haired woman cackled and shoved the crystalline man into the path of Cyclops’ eye-beam and it split into half a dozen smaller, thinner beams as it went through his body like sunlight, refracted around him. One of the beams smashed into Logan and knocked him to the floor. The Native American man narrowed his eyes, glaring at Scott, and began to pluck weaponry components from where they were attached to his costume, hands flying as he put them together. In less than fifteen seconds, he held what looked like a fully-functional gun in his hands, and aimed it at Scott.

“Look out!” Lauren screamed.

Scott did his best to dodge, but what came out of the barrel of the gun was not a bullet or a beam but a thick cylindrical cartridge of some kind. The shell split open halfway before it hit him, and what reached him was a rapidly expanding glob of thick red foam, splattering against his chest and growing to engulf him. It hardened as it spread and grew, turning from opaque to clear, and left him encased in an enormous ruby crystal.

Kurt vanished in a foul-smelling puff of smoke and reappeared instantly over the crystalline man’s head, slamming his clenched-together fists into the back of the man’s head, hammering him to the ground. Before he could teleport away again, the green-haired woman threw up her hands and a wave of dizziness—strong enough to cause nausea and knock her off her feet—crashed through the room. Kurt howled and cartwheeled off, crashing into a wall.

Lauren wrenched herself to her feet, trying to ignore her churning stomach, though she wanted to gag, and stepped in front of Logan as he struggled to drag himself to his feet.

“Get out of here or I’ll do to you what I did to Scrambler!” she growled, bluffing as best as she could. “Leave us alone!”

They all laughed, even Prism, who had gotten back to his feet after Kurt had hit him. “Look at the kid trying to pretend she has balls,” the green haired woman cackled.

The Native American man shook his head. “We don’t have time for this shit,” he grumbled. “Arclight, Blockbuster, tear her in two. I want her blood on the floor.”

The muscular man and woman lunged forward, both of them looming over her. “Don’t touch me!” she howled a warning, wishing she had her mental blasts back. Each of them reached to grab one of her arms; as ordered, they meant to rip her in two like a turkey’s wishbone.

“Make a wish,” the man laughed to his companion.

Their hands closed over the skin of her wrists and she pushed out desperately with her mind, trying—since her mental powers were not working—to the place in her that interacted with time, like she had when she had touched the fallen timber blocking the door.

They seized her and both froze. Lauren watched in stunned silence as threads of silver ran through their hair, followed by deep wrinkles worn into their faces, especially around their eyes and mouth. Their bodies began to wither, their grips falling away from her wrists as their strength lessened and their joints began to ache. They staggered, spines curving, bodies stooping, the pale film of cataracts spreading over their eyes.

“What the fuck…?” the knife-throwing tornado wielder whispered.

They were aging, aging at a horrifically accelerated rate, and even as Logan staggered to his feet behind her, and Kurt dragged himself over to where Scott stood trapped, pulling the crystal over behind Logan.

“I told them not to touch me,” Lauren said quietly, as the two fell to ashes. But horror at killing again—this time, more or less willingly--was fading and being replaced with grim horror.

“Sonofabitch!” Prism howled.

Her mind moved with cold logic that was wholly unlike her. The green-haired woman—Vertigo, she decided to call her, for lack of a better name—and the crystal man—Prism, for now—could hurt but not kill, unless they got lucky.

The same could not be said for the spinner with knives and the Native American hunter.

That moved them to the top of the list, as far as she was concerned.

“Last chance,” she repeated the hunter’s words back to him, her tone gone as cold as she had ever heard Logan be. “Get out or you’re next.”

“Kid—” Logan grunted.

She waved him back. It was all bluff, she was terrified to the core, but she could not let it show.

“Scalphunter?” the green-haired woman said tensely.

The hunter scowled, looking ready to make the hard choice, and then he suddenly grinned. At the same time, Lauren felt something soft circling her throat.

She reached up almost in irritation, feeling at it, and found a soft velvet and lace collar with an ivory cameo at the center.

Even as she tore it free, she could feel her mental shields snap into place again, could hear the whisper of the mental voices of the people around her. The dull itch of the healing cut on her hand vanished. She glanced down at the cut, scrubbing her palm against her leg, and the dried blood flaked away, revealing unscarred skin.

When she looked up again, she could see every detail of the lives of the intruders, even those of the two piles of dust on the floor. Scalphunter, Prism, Arclight, Blockbuster, Riptide, Vertigo—the names filled her head, and she wondered how she had guessed so many of them correctly without her powers, and then she glanced down at the cameo in her head, and another name—Malice—popped into her head, along with yet another life history.

“Well, well, well,” she murmured. “Look at you, all sneaky and psychic and bodiless.”

“Fuck,” Scalphunter rasped. “Everyone out.”

“She broke free of Malice!” the spinner with the knives—Riptide—yowled.

“ ** _OUT_**!” Scalphunter roared.

“I don’t think so,” Lauren growled, at the same time she felt Logan leap forward from behind her.

Vertigo and Prism broke and ran, even as Logan crashed into Scalphunter, claws sinking deep into the man’s chest and gut, even as Scalphunter drew a knife and slashed out at Logan’s throat, the soft spot where the spine prevented complete decapitation, but there were no adamantium-bonded bones to prevent anyone from cutting his carotid artery and jugular vein. Blood gushed out to paint them both scarlet.

Riptide spun, knives flying. Kurt yelped and vanished, several blades bounced off the ruby crystal imprisoning Scott—it had only been two minutes, he might not have suffocated yet—and more than a few ended up buried in Logan’s back.

Lauren felt three of the blades hit her—chest, upper left thigh, and just above the crest of her right hipbone, burying itself in her intestines and severing her appendix. She screamed—it hurt, of course—but she was riding on pure adrenaline and rage now, and she yanked them out, one at a time, heedless of the hot blood that gushed over her fingers. She lashed out with her mind at the same time, as hard as she could, and Riptide, Prism, and Vertigo stopped in their tracks, toppling over without a sound.

Scalphunter grunted, her mental blast smashing into his head at the same time as Logan’s claws slashed into him again. He staggered, clearly hurt, but didn’t fall as easily as his teammates.

Lauren lashed out again with her mind, slamming into Scalphunter, who stumbled. “Logan!” she shouted. “Get Scott out of that crystal before he suffocates!” The order spilled out of her lips almost naturally, something she had never done before, and Logan snarled, but yanked back from their last assailant, and Lauren reached out with her mind to Kurt.

<Take his knees out from under him. Rapid teleport, random locations around the room, until he can’t even stay conscious!> There was blood trickling from Scalphunter’s nose as Kurt ‘ported to him, grabbed him, and then teleported again and again with machine-gun rapidity through the room, half a dozen times. He materialized up near the ceiling and dumped the unconscious Scalphunter down onto the floor.

Meanwhile, Logan was hacking at the red crystal with careful strokes, chipping away bit pieces with wide swings of his arms, then small pieces, around Scott’s nose, then mouth. The young man gulped in huge gusts of air as Logan worked to free the rest of his body.

The wounds Riptide’s blades had made in her body had already healed as Lauren reached out with her mind until she found Hank and her father.

< _Dad? We have a problem. >_

The response was immediate and concerned. < _Lauren? What’s happening? What problem? What’s wrong? >_

< _The school was attacked. There was an explosion, there’s been a considerable amount of damage. There was a group of mutants that called themselves the Marauders. I have their names and code names and info from them all, including that of a psychic who has no body; I’m currently holding her prisoner in a part of my brain. Also, I know who they were working for, who didn’t come with them. They said they were looking for Quire. Three of them are dead; one is MIA after he touched me after he scrambled my powers; I think my connection to the historical record may have sent him elsewhere in time. >_

Even as she was explaining everything that had happened to him, she had split her attention and was doing a telepathic head count. The other students the attackers hadn’t brought to the game room with them were still alive and well and keeping their heads down elsewhere in the school. A couple had minor injuries from the explosion, but none were seriously hurt. < _Scott and a couple of the others have minor injuries. Logan took more serious ones, but as you might imagine, those are already healed. >_ She did not mention her own wounds. < _The other attackers that aren’t dead or missing are unconscious in Logan’s custody. Jean, Ororo, and Raven were at the mall before this started. I don’t know where Erik or Pietro are. >_

_< Erik left a day ago. Pietro is probably out at a local restaurant—his metabolism is very high and needs a lot of food to sustain. Child, how are **you**? You mention one of them scrambled your powers…are you hurt? >_

_< Not any more,> _she answered honestly.

< _Lauren!_ > he wailed, his anguished mental tone very clear.

< _The scrambling effect wore off, >_ she said. < _I didn’t suffer any major injuries until I had my healing factor back, just a couple minor cuts and bruises. Kids’ stuff. >_

_< Major inj—what happened?>_ he exclaimed.

< _You should just come home. You’re just making yourself upset, >_ she tried to console him.

< _I had Hank get us out of here the minute you contacted me, >_ he said. _< We are on our way home as I speak. How badly hurt were you?>_

_< Dad…>_ she protested.

< _No, don’t try to distract me by calling me that, no matter how much I love it, >_ he said. < _I promised to keep you safe when you came here, and I fail time and time again. >_

_< The only safe place is inside a grave,>_ she said. < _That’s from Epictetus. You can’t keep me protected forever. Not with who we are and what we can do. We can be careful, but we can never be safe. I fought these bastards tonight and while I was doing it, all I cared about was stopping them and helping protect my classmates. I completely forgot about my fear and despair over Creed and Quire. >_ She paused. < _I want to join the X-Men. >_

He was silent for a long, long time. Finally, he spoke. < _We’ll discuss it when I get home. >_

_< Fair enough,>_ she said, and let go of the connection to turn and survey the room. Logan had finished freeing Scott from his red crystal prison, and just as she turned, Kitty and Erin and the rest of her classmates appeared in the doorway, gaping. Kurt had moved Doug, Beak, and Anole to the few couches that weren’t completely littered with fallen debris from the explosion.

“Kitty, you’re going to be fastest. Can you run to the infirmary and get me a first aid kit, please?” she asked. Kitty ran off. “Kurt, sit down. You’ve got knife wounds everywhere. Sit down before you bleed out.” He shot her a faint, abashed grin and sank into a chair with a sigh of relief.

Kitty returned quickly, and with Hank’s medical knowledge swimming in her head, she examined Kurt’s wounds first. Most were minor, and she bound them up; there was a knife wound in his thigh that had half-severed one of the major muscles, and she grimaced; the game room was no place to perform surgery. She heard him hiss in pain as she cleaned and stitched up the other knife wounds, which were mostly flesh wounds, fortunately for him. Logan was tying up the prisoners, and she cast a look over her shoulder at him after she stitched up the last of Kurt’s cuts. “The professor needs more cells in the basement,” she told him faintly. “When you finish with them, can you carry Kurt to the infirmary? This last wound needs surgery, but I think a hospital is maybe not a great idea, and the game room is the wrong place for it.”

He eyed her for a moment, but nodded. “Sure thing, kid. I’ll call in the nurse, if she ain’t run away screamin’.”

She nodded and went on to check the other students’ injuries. Other than minor scrapes and bruises, only Anole had any real injuries, a broken arm; probably gotten when he had been captured, which suggested that the others had been taken completely by surprise. Fortunately, it was a simple rather than compound break, the two ends of bone not out of alignment, so it didn’t require painful setting; she splinted and bound it. “We can put a cast on this in the infirmary,” she told him.

She looked over at Logan. “Do you think Magneto would help with clearing away the wreckage and rebuilding?” she asked.

He made a face. “Don’t call that guy, he’s a prick,” he muttered.

She snorted. “I see.” She was tired. It had been a long damn day, and it wasn’t even dinnertime yet. “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess the kitchen is in no shape to make dinner. I’m going to contact Raven and have her and the others bring pizza back with them. At least we won’t starve.” She looked around wearily. “Oh. And these guys were here for Quire. Maybe I should go check on them, make sure that no one made it to where he’s being held.”

“I don’t think they got access for you yet,” Logan muttered.

“Oh, for pete’s sake…” she grumbled. “Kitty, can you phase me down to the level of the Danger Room?”

Kitty nodded. “Sure thing,” she said. “Come on.”

Lauren stepped to her side and Kitty held out her hand. Lauren hesitated for less than a second before she took it, and then they were sinking down through the floor at about the same speed as that of the elevator, and in little more than a minute, they were standing in the hall just a little bit down from the entrance to the Danger Room. She could see the door to Creed’s old cell, which had become, in turn, Quire’s cell.

She was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to be standing open.

“Shit,” she u hissed. “Phase. Go get Logan. Does this crap ever end?”

Kitty looked at her with wide, startled eyes, let go of her hand, and swam back up through the ceiling, even as Lauren reached out with her mind to warn both Logan and her father—

\--and hit the mental equivalent of a brick wall.

_Shitshitshit—_

“Relax, _chere_ , I ain’t here to hurt you,” the words came from behind her—warm, smooth, sensual, charming, with a heavy Cajun accent—at the same time she started to turn around and felt a set of strong, powerful arms clad in leather wrap around her, pinning her own arms to her side.

She went rigid at being touched not just by a man but a total stranger, and lashed out again entirely on automatic with the biggest mental blast she could summon. A pained grunt came from down the hall, in the darkness of the cell, and Quire stepped out of the cell, glaring hatefully at her.

“Kill her!” he hissed, and in that moment, she realized how much he despised her, that he truly meant it, and more, why. She could see it written baldly across his history—how sure he was that she was the stronger psychic, the smarter student, and how much he needed neither thing to be true.

Enough to kill her for it.

“What are you talkin’ ‘bout, _homme_? Kill a pretty girl like dis? Never. I just gon’ give her a little kiss an’ then we can be on our way. Don’ worry, p’tite, you in no danger here.”

She raged, writhed, kicked, trying to turn around so she could look at him, learn all his secrets—

“ _Don’t let her see you!”_ Quire shouted.

A leather-clad hand came up to cover her eyes, even as she felt warm lips on the side of her throat, surprisingly gentle. A gloved hand wasn’t a face, but it was enough; it was part of him, the hands that had pulled those gloves on that morning had been bare then, attached to the rest of him. Remy LeBeau of New Orleans, master thief, mutant, son of the chief of the New Orleans thieves’ guild, working for another mutant, Mr. Sinister, just like the Marauders had been—

She felt a tight pinch to the other side of her neck, and then nothing.

 

 

“—et her out of there!” She heard her father’s panicked voice cry out.

Lauren tried to move and found she could not; the spot on her neck where the Cajun thief—Gambit, he called himself—still tingled unpleasantly from the pressure of his fingers. In her head, she could see all his knowledge, all his moves, and she knew it would wear off. The usual was about an hour, probably a great deal less for someone with a healing factor, and it only inhibited voluntary movement, not breathing or heartbeat or other autonomic nervous system functions. _At least he was serious about not killing me,_ she contemplated, but deep inside her, a chilling rage at being touched against her will battled with the lingering panic from when he had seized her and her mental attack had rebounded, mostly harmlessly, against the mindshield Quire had throw up around his brain.

Because the Cajun was no telepath. She could see that plain as day.

“Kid,” Logan’s voice came from very near her ear. “Whoever was down here let Quire out an’ locked ya up in his cell afterward.   I’m gonna pick ya up. I can smell you’re awake, I figure ya can’t move yet. I ain’t gonna hurt ya, so try not ta scramble my brain, okay?”

Without waiting for an answer, he slid his arms under her shoulders and knees and lifted her into the air. She felt only an initial start of surprise—the standard worry about falling—and then she felt herself cradled against his chest. He was warm, his body was firm, and she felt a sudden and completely uncontrollable surge of need rush through her body. The smell of him—sweat and musk and other people’s blood—was not nearly as objectionable as she had thought it might be, and she felt him turn and then walk. She could tell by the decrease in darkness filtering through her closed eyelids that they had left Creed’s cell and stepped out into the hallway, heading for the elevator.

“Kid…c’mon,” Logan muttered, _very_ quietly, under his breath as he reached the elevator. “Th’ way ya smell…what I know you’re feelin’…”

She could distinctly tell how uncomfortable she made him, but he had never said anything about it before, and her mood crashed and burned as the door opened.

< _I’m sorry,_ > she ‘sent’ miserably. < _I can’t help it. Being attracted to you…I can’t help that any more than you can help what you feel for Jean. Or Mariko. Or Silver Fox._ > That was all she could manage to force out. The relief of realizing the thief’s nerve punch had not kept her from using her telepathy was not enough to overwhelm the dejection as she understood that he had no interest in her whatever and very likely never would.

She heard Xavier’s chair when into the elevator next to Logan and then the doors closed and it went up. She could feel her eyelids twitching and realized that the nerve pinch paralysis was wearing off.

She heaved at her body like a puppeteer jerking at his puppet’s strings and was rewarded by feeling one hand tremble, then the other. One knee spasmed, her foot flailing upward a few inches, and then she wrenched her eyes open.

Logan looked down at her with an expression of sadness on his face, and at that moment, the elevator came to a stop back on the ground floor as the doors opened.

“Put me down, please,” she said quietly, with as much dignity as she could muster.

He lowered her, legs-first, and kept the rest of her body supported and vertical. She took a hesitant step, testing for weakness or numbness, and then, finding none, took another.

“Lauren?” her father asked, sounding confused as she headed off down the hall.

“Going to my room,” she said stiffly, not turning to look at them, and walked away.


	13. Evolution Takes Us By the Hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's either all conflict or all aftermath.

_“He who falls in love with himself_

_shall have no rivals.”_

_\--Benjamin Franklin_

 

**Westchester, NY**

**Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters**

**Monday, June 20, 1983**

           

She didn’t come out of her room for dinner, with the sound of the school being repaired all around her. Her father had ended up calling Magneto despite Logan’s wishes, and between his control of metal, Jean’s telekinesis, Erin’s control of water (useful, since many of the water mains had burst), and Ororo to keep the weather mild and even while they worked, a job that should have taken at least three months to perform was reduced to three days. No cranes or heavy machinery were required to move steel I-beams or loads of weighty brick and timber.

Lauren kept her door locked and tidied up her room as best as she could without a broom and dustpan, vacuum cleaner, or any other tools. She picked up shards of glass, lumps of shattered plaster, and even loose bricks with her hands, tossing the glass and plaster into her trash can until it was full. The broken bricks went out the windows.

Someone eventually left a dinner tray outside her door, and when she was sure they had gone, she opened her door to bring it in, finding also a broom and dustpan, mop and bucket, and a box of new plastic garbage bags. She brought those in as well.

Dinner was bland and unappetizing, but she ate it, then finished cleaning before she went back to working on her paper for Xavier. She was nearly finished, needing only to write the conclusion, but she was finding it nearly impossible to tie everything off into a neat, satisfying, educationally convincing finish.

She suspected most people would make a snide comment over that being a metaphor for life, and fought the urge to chuck her word processor through one of the glass panels of the French doors.

There was a rap at her door.

Lauren snuck a peak out to the hallway telepathically and groaned at ‘seeing’ Jean out there. _Of course._

“Hey, Lauren, can I come in?” the redhead called.

“Do you _have_ to?” Lauren answered back acerbically.

_< Well, no, not necessarily,>_ the other telepath said. < _We could talk like this… >_

“Worse! Worse! So much worse!” Lauren yelled, shoring up her shields. “Come in!”

The door opened and Jean stepped in, shutting the door after her. Lauren hunched over the desk and her word processor with a sullen look.

“Hey,” Jean said brightly. Lauren shot her a dour glare. “Okay, what have I done to deserve that look?”

“Are you hear to talk to me about Logan?” Lauren asked.

“Well…yes,” Jean said hesitantly.

“That’s what,” Lauren answered. She stayed at her desk as Jean sat down on her bed, keeping turned away from the redhead.

“You don’t want to talk about Logan?” Jean asked carefully.

“Let’s just say that I don’t think talking to _you_ about Logan will be either productive or pleasant,” Lauren said morosely.

“He knows you feel about him,” Jean began, but Lauren cut her off.

“Of course he does. He can smell my scent change when he’s around,” Lauren muttered. _Like a bitch dog in heat,_ she thought angrily.

Jean winced, and Lauren clamped down tighter on her shields.

“Lauren, Logan thinks you’re pretty, but—” she faltered for a moment as Lauren speared her through with an acid stare. _I’m not going to do the ‘he thinks I’m **pretty**?’ or the ‘oh, god, he **thinks** about me?’ teen girl clichés,_ Lauren thought darkly.

“—but he _doesn’t_ have the same kind of feelings for you, and you’re so young,” Jean continued.

Lauren interrupted. “Let’s not pretend age has the slightest thing to do with all this, shall we?” she barked. “Tell me, did Logan ask you to come talk to me for him?”

“Well, no,” Jean hesitated.

“Does he even know you’re here?” Lauren hammered the question in.

Jean’s response was a sort of “ _oh GOD no!_ ” expression and a hasty shake of her head.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” Lauren said bitterly. “Let me tell you what this is all about, shall I? At least one of us should—”

“It’s just, you’ve been throwing yourself at him,” Jean said quickly, and then stopped, a nervous expression on her face as Lauren fixed her with a gimlet stare.

“I’ve never said one goddamned thing to him about it if he didn’t bring the matter up first,” Lauren said, her voice lethally soft. “I’ll continue with where I was going before you so rudely interrupted.” She took a deep breath. “Because at least one of us should be honest about this, and since you seem incapable of it, at least when it comes to men—” Jean huffed in outrage but Lauren ignored her and kept going. “You’ve been at the school for awhile and you have big scary mental powers and a lot of the other students are scared of you, and you seem to like that. It makes you feel special. Scott comes along and he has big scary death-ray powers and other students are scared of him and you latched onto that like melting cheese on top of a burger. Good for you. Only then Logan comes along and he’s drawn to you because you gave him back a little tiny bit of his memory when you freed him from Stryker. He doesn’t even remember it was you who did that, by the way, all of that is buried in his subconscious. And you realized you got a huge thrill from having two cute guys hanging all over you. Of course, Logan is—”

“You can’t—”

“—Logan is older, so some folks think it not appropriate, and Scott is insecure and jealous, so you keep telling Logan that you don’t feel the same way, and—”

“Don’t you dare—” Jean blurted, but Lauren kept going, all of it pouring out of her like venom from a rattlesnake’s bite.

“—and that he has to stop, but you’re lying, you love how it makes you feel.”

“ ** _GET OUT OF MY HEAD!”_** Jean shrieked.

“No,” Lauren said stonily. “ _You_ get out of _my_ head.”

“What? I’m not—I’ve never read your mind,” Jean protested.

Lauren rolled her eyes. “Idiot. What do you know about my powers?”

“You—you’re a—a telepath, like me, and you can…look backward in time? Post-cognition?” Jean said slowly.

“Telepath, yes. Post-cog, no. I connect to the historical record of anything or anyone I look at. Everything someone’s ever seen, done, heard, felt, thought, I know it the moment I see them. I read minds, yeah, but I also read time. There is a little mental duplicate of Jean Grey in my head and it’s going to be there forever. I can’t turn the power off, either. So, like I say— _you_ get out of _my_ head. It updates constantly each new time I see you.” Lauren hadn’t even told her father that yet. “I know every single thing about you, Jean. You have no secrets from me, and you can’t lie to me. Ever.” She gave the redhead a dark smile. “Still want to try to tell me that Logan’s mad that I ‘throw myself at him’, or do you want to be honest and admit that you don’t like having another powerful female telepath who has feelings for Logan because you think it steals your thunder? What if he were to decide to stop chasing someone who keeps saying she doesn’t want him and maybe— ** _maybe_** —look elsewhere? Then you wouldn’t feel so special, would you?”

Jean tore up off the bed and raced out of the room with an angry choking sound, slamming the door behind her.

Lauren shook her head, turning back to her word processor. She knew better than to think that Logan might come to her, after how he had reacted, but there was a slight possibility that he might turn away from Jean after she shared more of his memories about Silver Fox.

She didn’t hate Jean, but Lauren had seen her kind far too often in high school—pretty and far too aware of it, willing to use it as a sort of social currency to make sure her popularity and status was always at the top of the heap, kind in a sort of shallow, demonstrative way, using that faux concern for others to win approval, and smugly dismissive of anyone who couldn’t do anything for her or make her look good in one way or another. She would put herself out and exert effort to do things when there was real danger that could hurt her or change the status quo in a way that might affect her or those around her, but her life would never be filled with real kindness or concern for others.

That made Lauren a threat to her without even trying, because she was good at the same things Jean was good at—telepathy—and because Lauren was Xavier’s daughter, which put her into the same elevated social strata that Jean occupied without playing the game or even trying. Furthermore, Lauren paused grimly, Lauren wanted one of the men that Jean found it amusing to have dance on her puppet strings, which could not be allowed.

Thus the intended talk. She could see without trying what Jean had meant to do; come in, try to shame Lauren for ‘throwing’ herself at Logan, get her to withdraw even more, maybe even leave the school. _As if Xavier would allow that,_ she thought grimly. _I have no interest in challenging her role as Prom Queen and Class President of the school, but neither am I going to let her chase me out of the only home I have left._

She went back to her paper, finally managing to think of an ending to wrap it up, and then printed it out before going to throw herself down on her bed. _So Logan has no interest in me. One of the only two things that was motivating me, gone. As for the other…how likely is it, really, that Xavier is going to let me join the X-Men, especially so soon? He’s very protective, and I’m not trained, and in a sense, I’m redundant. Does the team need two telepaths? Likely not._

She contemplated the future. _Motivation—finding out what I want to do with my life—is all that keeps me from dwelling on what Creed did to me. Even what Quire tried is inconsequential in comparison. Five years of captivity in contrast to one attempt on my life? I still want to see Quire tried, but I’m not going to obsess over him, especially now that he’s probably in the wind._

_So there’s no hope of being with Logan in any way other than as a friend, and I probably won’t be joining the X-Men any time soon. I’d better focus on finding other things to keep my mind occupied, or I’m going to slide back into that pit of depression and fear that comes when all I can do is dwell on what Creed did to me._

Idly, she looked inward, concentrating on Scrambler to see if her now-restored gift could show her what had happened to him. Images bloomed in front of her eyes on the movie screen of her mind, a vast lake of fire and lava, black smoke filling the skies and blotting out the sun, not a single sign of life anywhere until Scrambler popped into view in the middle of it al and instantly burst into flame. A gasp escaped her lips and she winced. “Shit,” she muttered, and sat up, reaching out with her mind to Xavier.

< _I figured out what happened to Scrambler, >_ she ‘sent’, still a little stunned.

< _Oh? > _his answer came instantly. _ <Tell me?>_

_< Better to show you,> _she replied. _ <I was able to draw up his lifeline in the historical record. He went back in time. Really far back,> _she said, and let the images unreel for him like a movie in his mind.

_< That…looks like the Hadean Era,> _Xavier said slowly. _ <Back when the earth was first forming, and was pretty much nothing but a ball of molten rock. Child, that was over four billion years ago.>_

_< I know, because you know,> _she said. _ <I didn’t intend to kill him. In a way, it was suicide, since he did it to himself by touching me and disrupting my powers. But he couldn’t have known.> _She stared bleakly up at the ceiling. _ <How many deaths am I responsible for now?>_

_< Lauren, you cannot think that way. The ones who died when your powers manifested were an accident. All those since then have either been in self-defense or also accidents, from acts they took. Like Scrambler. You are not a killer.>_

She was quiet for a moment. < _Quire got away, didn’t he? With the thief who knocked me out? >_

His tone was sad. _< Yes, Lauren. I am sorry.>_

She thought about Quire, calling his timeline up in her mind. Quire stood talking with another mutant whom she instantly recognized as the “Mr. Sinister” that the Cajun thief known as Gambit was working for.

Before she could even focus with her telepathy to listen in, the very tall mutant with the chalk-white skin, shark’s teeth, and jet black hair turned away from Quire…and toward where she was watching. He bared those sharp, vicious teeth as if smiling at her.

And he winked.

Lauren cried out and then the entire scene and her view of it went black. Somehow, he had blocked her.

“Sonofa—” she hissed, and bolted up from her bed, grabbed her printed report off her printer—the words ‘visual facility with and control of the tachyon field’ flashed mid-page before her eyes—and raced off toward her father’s office, ostensibly to drop off the research paper, but actually to discuss with him what she had just seen.

She came to a stop just outside his door, which was closed, and lifted her hand to knock, but paused for a moment as she realized there was a voice coming from inside that wasn’t her father. Female. Unhappy. Shrill.

Jean.

Lauren let her hand drop and sighed, turning away from the door, dropping the research paper into the wire basket on the little end table just outside his door and trudged back to her room.

She had no doubt whatsoever that Jean was in there complaining about their ‘conversation’. She wasn’t afraid of any consequences that might arise; she had told the truth. But she was unhappy that Xavier would have to deal with it—and more than a little annoyed that he had clearly been listening to Jean the entire time Lauren had been engaging in a telepathic discussion with him. It had not escaped her that Jean was one of his favorite students, and while she didn’t think he would permit bias to distort things, she was displeased that he was getting stuck in the middle.

She settled back on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Motivation. Plans. Goals. The two goals she had originally set for herself—or rather, dreams, not goals—were both out the window. She needed to find some new ones.

She had talked with her father about testing out of as many classes as possible, and earning a degree or twelve.

She still wanted to finish giving Logan back his memories.

Briefly, she contemplated the notions of money and a job. The younger kids here were all just still students, but the older ones didn’t go to classes except to teach. They had things like shiny red sportscars and motorcycles and went on trips to shop at the mall. Did they have jobs? Did they get paid for teaching? If not, where did their spending money come from? She could remember going to the mall with her friends back home when she was still in high school. Her parents—adoptive parents—had given her an allowance for washing the dishes on weekends, and she had done the occasional bit of babysitting, like plenty of teenaged girls.

She sat up slowly as she thought of her adoptive parents. Her grief and guilt over their passing had kept her from thinking of them too much since waking here at the school after being freed from Creed’s hidden dungeon. For the first time, she wondered what had happened to the house she had grown up in, and all her things. Sold, she guessed, although not to pay for the funeral and the graves—her father’s work as a lawyer had taken care of those future necessities by the time she was five.

The thought spurred another; what was the official story about what had happened to her? Did the people in the town—those who had survived—think she had been responsible for the deaths (she had been, most of them anyway, although Creed had to take the blame for killing her parents and all Stryker’s men)? Did they think she was dead? Or in prison somewhere?

She expected Xavier might know, but she was not going to go ask him about it right now and interrupt Jean’s rant. It was definitely something to wait and ask him about later. Tomorrow, perhaps.

It was really only a concern—jobs and money—insofar as she imagined she might not want to stay at the school forever, especially if the thing with Logan and the tension between her and Jean became unbearable. Right now, she couldn’t even get a job at McDonald’s, since she had no ID and worse, no birth certificate or Social Security card to prove who she was. Those things had been lost at her adoptive family’s home when Creed had taken her. She assumed she could use her telepathy to ‘convince’ any hiring manager to think they had seen her ID, but it wouldn’t last from person to person. As for earning degrees, plural, by testing out of classes here…what business owner was likely to believe an 18-year-old had multiple college degrees?

She stared at her ceiling moodily, pondering on such things, and her outlook kept getting lower and lower, even as it got darker and darker in the slice of the world visible through her French doors.

Finally, her stomach growled loudly, reminding her that she had not eaten in hours—since well before Jean had come knocking at her door, and before that…she couldn’t remember. A glance at the digital clock on her bedside table showed her that it was after two in the morning. She made a face and got out of bed, pulling on slippers and heading out of her room, down the hall to the kitchen. At this point, even a bowl of Lucky Charms would be enough to tide her over until breakfast.

She glanced at the wire basket outside her father’s office as she walked past and saw that her paper was gone. She wondered if he had read it yet. She knew she could look back along the timeline to find out, but at the moment, it just didn’t seem crucial.

She pushed through the kitchen doors and came to a stop. The refrigerator door stood open, spilling light out into the darkened room, and she heard the clink of glass against glass.

Logan straightened up from where he was bent down, shielded by the door, a pair of beer bottles in his hands. He stopped warily as he saw her. “Kid,” he acknowledged her. “What ya doin’ up this late?”

“Hungry,” she said with a shrug. “Arguing with your girlfriend burns up a lot of calories.” It was more snide than she had meant, but Jean’s accusation still burned.

“Ain’t got a girlfriend,” he snorted, setting one of the bottles down on the kitchen counter and twisting the cap off the other with one hand. He took a long drink of the cold beer, and she watched his throat as he swallowed, fascinated.

“I know exactly where Stryker is right now, how many troops he has, vehicles, weapons, everything,” she said breathlessly, an idea coming fully to her in that moment.

He stiffened, set the half-empty bottle down on the counter, and stepped toward her, his face gone intent, the predatory look in his eyes fully focused. “Tell me,” he demanded.

She shook her head, even as he backed her up against the wall, an inch away from their bodies touching, eyes locked on each other. He probably meant it to be intimidating. It was not.

“No,” she said. “Not unless you take me with you.”

 


	14. Diamonds Are Formed by Pressure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Road trip.

_“It is not stress that kills us,_

_but our reaction to it.”_

_\--Hans Selye_

 

**Westchester, NY**

**Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters**

**Tuesday, June 21, 1983**

           

            Logan recoiled. “Not a chance in Hell,” he blurted.

            “Then you get nothing,” she said with a shrug. He was impossible to bluff when he could smell if she was lying, so she had just decided that she was not going to let it bother her.

            He glared down at her. “Oh, yer gonna tell me what I need, kid,” he growled, flexing his hands.

            She laughed in his face. “You aren’t going to hurt me,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s not the kind of man you are. At worst, you’ll drag me off to my father, but that won’t work, either, because I’m not going to just give him the information so he can give it to you, and he’s not going to try to pry it out of my head. He knows I’d fight that, and there’s no way he’d risk hurting me after all I’ve been through.” He snarled. “Come on, Logan! You were at the scene five years ago after Creed took me away. You saw all the dead bodies in uniform that he hacked up. Those were Stryker’s men, and they were there for me. If Creed had been slower getting there, they would have taken me away, and then I—with a healing factor just like yours—would have been put through the exact same things as you, most likely. Okay, I don’t have claws, but they would have figured out something. You let me help you, dammit, and help myself, too. Maybe if I do this, some of those goddamned nightmares will finally go away!”

            He glared at her, his gaze raking down from her pale face to her pajamas to her bare feet. “Get changed, pack a bag,” he finally growled. “Meet me in the garage in ten minutes. On this trip, you do exactly what I tell you or I leave you at the side of the road, you understand?”

            “I understand,” she said softly. She could sense the anger roiling off of him, but he was going to do it.

            He stepped back and she ran, not even trying to be quiet, except with her mind. She was back in her room in 60 seconds, throwing off her pajamas and yanking on jeans, a clean black t-shirt. She shoved socks, underwear, two bras, two other t-shirts, a spare pair of jeans, and her sneakers into a backpack, along with her hairbrush, deodorant, soap, shampoo, toothbrush and toothpaste.

            She knew where they were headed; she had no coat, as yet, warmer than a sweatjacket, and she grabbed it, even though the days there had been in the high 80s, heading for 90.

            The Colorado mountains got a lot colder, even in the summer.

            She made it to the garage with thirty seconds to spare. Logan stood next to a sleek black motorcycle, one helmet on his head, the other in one hand. He held it out to her, eyeing her as she shrugged the backpack on. “Get this on,” he said, lifting a leg over the bike’s seat to straddle it.

            She took it obediently, pulled it on, adjusted the straps, buckled it, and climbed on the bike behind him.

            “You ever ride one of these before?” he asked gruffly.

            “No, but my brain has you in it,” she said. “I know how to ride it. I could drive it if I had to—well, assuming I could manage the weight.”

            He snorted. “Yer backpack will try ta pull ya over backward, especially on turns or uphill, even with the seat back. Ya better hold on. Chuck’s gonna kill me fer this anyway, might as well not give him a reason ta torture me, too.”

            “He wouldn’t!” she protested indignantly, though she was not entirely sure what her father could be driven to by extremes of emotion, even with having a mental duplicate of him in her head. Her father was…complicated.

            “Little girl, you got no idea how crazy you make yer old man,” he muttered. “I ain’t 100% sure he wouldn’t shut the school an’ all this down if somethin’ happened to ya, so let’s not let somethin’ happen to ya.” He shook his head. “I said hold on.”

            She leaned forward and slid her arms around his waist, resting her face against the broad span of his back. He was wearing a dark brown leather jacket with dark orange stripes around the upper arms, so in addition to his usual scent was added a note of leather, sharp and biting. She inhaled deeply, savoring the smell, a swirl of heat knotting in her lower gut, a feeling she had never experienced before, and even as he was stomping down on the pedal to start the bike, he swore.

            “Jesus Christ,” he growled, low in his throat. “Ya can’t do that, kid, or this is never going to work.”

            “I told you before,” she said quietly. “I can’t help how you make me feel. Best I can do is promise—” it almost spilled out, then, ‘not to throw myself at you, like Jean said’, but she bit it back fast, “—to try not to be too obvious.”

            He started the bike, which roared, and pulled out of the garage. She thought it was fortunate that the garage was set away from the house; the noise would certainly wake all the wrong people, if it was closer.

            He waited until they had left the school grounds to tap the side of his helmet, an obvious signal, and she followed his cue, listening to his thoughts, the side of her face still pressed against his back.

            < _Which way? > _he asked her, thinking clearly _. <Is he up in Canada at the Alkali Lake dam site again?>_

_ <No. West,> _she said, not giving him the location outright, because then he would have no reason, as he said, not to leave her at the side of the road—and this, still within walking distance of the school.

_ <West, when?> _he demanded, turning his motorcycle in that direction. _< I need a little more than a compass point.>_

Well, Colorado was a big state. He would still need her along. _ <Head for Colorado. I’ll give more directions as we get closer.>_

            He grunted and his head jerked in a nod, and he drove.

            They didn’t stop for five hours, just after eight AM, and by that time they had reached Ohio. He pulled off the road via an off-ramp at a truck stop, filling the bike’s gas tank up, and then they headed into the diner portion of the truck stop for breakfast. Her stomach had continued to growl hungrily since they had left, and Logan looked over at her as they sank into a booth, one brow rising. “You got money, little girl?” he asked coolly.

            “You know I don’t, Logan,” she said with a frown. It was obvious what he was doing, trying to drive her away so he could send her back to the school.

            “Guess ya gonna be awful hungry by the time we get where we’re goin’, then, aintcha?” he asked calmly.

            She had seen it coming—he had, after all, invited her into his mind so they could communicate down the road—and she had already been skimming the minds of the truckers in the diner, looking for just the right one.

            And she found him—a stout, silver-haired, broadly smiling old man. At the top of his mind was the thought that she reminded him of his grand-daughter, and she built on that, weaving and molding his thoughts as he got up from his own booth to pay his bill.

            Logan looked up, bristling as the man stopped at their booth at the same time the waitress got there. “’Scuse me,” the trucker said to the waitress, startling her. “This l’il girl here reminds me of my granddaughter so much, go ahead an’ add her bill to mine, please.”

            The waitress looked surprised, but nodded. Logan was staring at Lauren from across the table, and the waitress took his order first, then Lauren’s order separately—bacon, toast, sausage, pancakes, coffee, and hash browns. The old trucker patted her on the shoulder and she tolerated it, giving him a grateful smile; she had gone through his mind with a fine-toothed comb and made sure that the person she picked was a decent sort. He had a habit of feeding the baby ducks at the lake by his home.

            Logan waited until both the trucker and the waitress had gone before snorting. “You sure ain’t your dad, that’s fer sure,” he observed, shaking his head.

< _That she is not, >_ Xavier’s mental voice rang through both their heads; his tone --as he appeared in his chair, a mental illusion visible only to the two of them, at the end of their table -- was pleasant enough, but with an undertone of disappointment.

            < _If you didn’t want me to psionically manipulate people on the road to keep from starving to death, perhaps we should have arranged an allowance or something, >_ she replied tartly to him alone.

            < _Perhaps if you didn’t want to worry about starving to death, you should have stayed home where it was safe, >_ he retorted.

            < _Safe? The place that just got blown up by attacking mutants? >_ she replied.

            He grimaced, a frustrated expression on his face. < _Why are the two of you out here? >_ he asked the both of them.

            _< I know exactly where Stryker is,>_ Lauren said patiently. < _How many men he has, what weapons, what other assets, the layout of his base, the others he’s got prisoner--everything. >_

            < _And, presuming that Logan wants to pursue that→_ he glanced over at Logan, who nodded,  < _\--why do you need to go along on this trip, my daughter? >_

            < _Because Stryker was after me, too, >_ she said, a little exasperated. < _Those were his men that Creed killed when he abducted me. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in hiding, afraid if I let my guard down, they’ll find me. >_

            < _And you do not trust Logan to handle the matter alone? >_ he asked.

            Logan looked at her. “Yeah. Good question, kid. Do you?”

            < _You both know very well that it isn’t about that, >_ Lauren said in frustration.

            _< You’re angry. I understand that. But vengeance does not suit you, child,>_ Xavier said.

            < _How do you know? >_ she asked, scowling. She had the presence of mind to pause as the waitress brought their coffee. When the woman was gone, she continued. < _For that matter, how do **I** know? I was a child when I was taken, and a slave for five years. I don’t know who the Hell I am anymore! >_  
            _< And you think you will find it in killing people who do not even know you?>_ Xavier asked sorrowfully.

            _< What, people who’d either kill me because I’m a mutant, or because Stryker tells them to?>_ she asked, scoffing. < _No great loss. >_

            Both Xavier and Logan winced. < _I am sorry you feel that way, Lauren, >_ Xavier said heavily. < _If you stop in the other section of this truck stop before you leave, they have a Western Union. I will wire you cash so you do not, at least, have to prey on unsuspecting innocents again. >_

            She nodded, stone-faced, and he vanished.

            They sat there in silence until the waitress came and brought their food and left again. Logan looked at her as he picked up his fork.

            “You hurt him pretty badly,” he said quietly.

            She looked up at him for a moment, knife and fork in hand, and regarded him wordlessly. “He reads minds, Logan, mind included. Should I have lied to him?” she asked at last. “I care for him at least enough to give him the gift of honesty.”

            “I dunno that he saw that as a gift,” he said in a low tone. “Maybe you should’ve cared enough to at least gone to the effort of lying.”

            “I don’t really think that would have been a great idea,” she sighed wearily. “And if he was _that_ upset about me being here, then why would he offer to wire me cash, when he knows I don’t have any photo ID to claim it, and so will need to use my gifts on the person manning the counter if I want to collect it?”

            Logan shook his head. “You’re a piece of work, kid,” he sighed, and went back to eating his food.

            The food had tasted pretty good up til that point, but it suddenly tasted like ash and weighed like lead in her mouth. Her stomach churned with acid and she looked down at her plate. She had been starving, but the weight of his opprobrium filled her stomach with seething nausea, and she stared dully at the floor. Objectively, she knew her body still needed food after only half a slice of toast, two pieces of bacon, and half a cup of coffee, but she had no desire to go through the motions of actually eating.

            Logan paused in mid-bite. “You gonna eat that? Don’t want you passin’ out from hunger an’ fallin’ off the back of the bike,” he said.

            “Really? Funny, I do remember you saying you’d leave me at the side of the road if I didn’t do what you told me to,” she said bitterly. The thought that not only did he not want her but that he would abandon her in the middle of nowhere to fend for herself if she moved a step out of line made her feel very small and alone.

            He paused with the fork halfway to his mouth and one brow lifted. He shook his head and went back to his food.

            She managed to get down about half of her meal before her stomach decided it wasn’t going to play nice any longer. She got up from the booth abruptly and raced for the ladies’ room, making it there just in time to slam a stall door open and lose everything she had just eaten into the toilet.

            She was relieved that there was no one else in the restroom at the moment. Her body heaved and quaked for several moments before she could pull herself together enough to get back up to her feet, flush the toilet, and use paper towels to clean up.

            For a fleeting moment, just for a second, she contemplated going back out to the restaurant, using her powers to find someone decent among the truckers, and just catch a ride with one, going wherever he was going, as far as he was going, just to get away from the expectations and disappointment of her father, the rejection she observed in Logan, the jealousy of Jean. None of the younger students at the school had been through anything remotely as traumatic as she had been; they didn’t-- _couldn’t_ \--understand her. Kitty was nice enough, she reminded Lauren of her old friends back in high school, but...it wasn’t enough to stay.

            She was so tired of being surrounded by people who had no comprehension of the trauma that had fractured her into a million little pieces, and who condemned anything she did to try to fix herself.

            But really, where would she go?

            She realized she had just been staring at the sink, washing her hands for at least five minutes. A flick of her mind out to the restaurant showed her that Logan was still out at their booth, finishing his coffee, and she dried her hands off and went back out to join him.

            He looked up at her cautiously as she sat back down, and she caught the slight flare of his nostrils that said he was taking in her scent.

            “You okay?” he asked gruffly.

            “What’s ‘okay’?” she asked with a weary laugh. The rest of her food still sat on her plate where she had left it, cold now, and she ignored it, knowing it would be a bad idea to eat it.

            “Let me get the cash the Professor is wiring me,” she said tiredly. “The Greyhound bus going back east stops here in eight hours, if the waitress’ thoughts are accurate. I’ll get a ticket and get my bag from your bus and tell you where Stryker is, and then you can go. This isn’t quite the side of the road. I’m sure they’ll let me wait here until the bus gets here if I keep buying coffee.” She was so tired of fighting. Giving in was just easier.

            He studied her for a moment, breathing in her smell. She wondered what she smelled like. _Probably a combination of puke and despair and defeat,_ she decided.

            He took a sip of his coffee. “Didn’t peg you for a quitter,” he said at last.

            Her jaw dropped. “You started this trip trying to get rid of me, and you spent the entire ride ever since then wanting me gone. What the hell?”

            “True,” he allowed. “But I know th’ demons you’re fighting, kid. The fear. The trauma. The pain. The rage. And I hate to see you give up.”

            It took everything she had not to scream at him in fury, and she knew he could smell that. At last, she slumped in her seat opposite him. “Fine,” she said, drained. “What do you want?”

            He looked up just as the waitress brought a to-go bag over, and handed the woman a pair of twenties. “I want to get back on the road,” he said flatly. “I don’t want to stop for lunch unless we have to. I’d like to make Nebraska by dark.” He glanced at the waitress. “Keep the change.”

            She got to her feet. “Okay,” she said quietly. “I’ll meet you out at the bike in a minute.”

            She came back out to the parking lot where he was waiting a full five minutes later, a big bulge in her pocket and a gobsmacked look on her face.

            “Something wrong?” he asked, frowning.

            “Wrong? Nothing’s...nothing’s _wrong_ , I’m just…” She trailed off. “He sent almost three thousand dollars. I’ve never even seen that much money before, much less had it. They had to open the safe.”

            He nodded. “Your dad loves you, kid, even if you ain’t reached that point yet yourself,” he said. “There probably isn’t almost anything you could ask that he wouldn’t do for you.”

            She blinked, shoving the money in her backpack and shouldering it, and put on her helmet when he handed it to her, then slung a leg over the seat of the bike behind him and leaned forward to hang on tight as he started the motorcycle up and pulled out of the parking lot.  


* * *

 

            He poured on the speed after they got past Chicago, pointing out that there weren’t a lot of police out looking for speeders in the long empty stretches of interstate highways in corn country, and she could see through his eyes that he was pushing the bike to 120, 130, 140 mph for an hour at a time before letting it drop to 70 or 75 again for awhile so the engine wouldn’t overheat or explode.

            She had been watching for police vehicles and flashing lights anyway the entire trip, just to be sure, and sure enough, at one point while the cycle was pushing 140, they blew past a billboard in a field with a local sheriff’s car hidden behind it, police radar gun aimed at the road. She heard Logan curse.

            But she had been ready for it--doing the same thing she had been doing for the entire trip; this was just the first such patrol that Logan had actually spotted.

            Even as they flew past the police car, she was in the officer’s head. He was reaching to turn on his lights and siren, releasing the parking break on his cruiser. She ate his memory of seeing them race past, erasing it and everything related to it in one single swipe of her mind, even as Logan kept driving further and further away.

            At last, she let the officer’s mind go, leaving him sitting in his car, trying to remember why he had one outstretched hand on the switch for the lights, his foot on the gas pedal, ready to pull out when there wasn’t a car in sight.

            Logan tapped on the side of his helmet again and she slid her thoughts into his as effortlessly as a freshly-waxed ski through snow. < _What? >_ Lauren asked.

            < _You do something to that cop? >_ he thought clearly.

            < _I made him forget he saw us, >_ she said. < _You said you wanted to be in Nebraska by dark. Getting stopped would not have helped with that, especially at that speed. And when he saw us--hard-assed older man, sweet young thing who might look underage--we would have been lucky if he didn’t shoot you. I figure I saved us at least a half-hour delay, minimum. >_

            He was silent for a moment, even in his thoughts. Then--

            _< Hard-assed, huh?>_ he said, a trace of humor creeping in around the edges.

            < _Well, I haven’t checked it myself, >_ she said wryly. < _But it looks hard. >_

            She expected him to huff and growl and glare and protest, but instead, he laughed.

            _< Sweet young thing?_> he added.

            < _Well...young, anyway. There’s folks who would disagree about the ‘sweet’ part. Sometimes I’m one of them. >_

            He laughed again, and they both relaxed a bit, though with her face buried against his back, it couldn’t be seen.

            She ate a cold bacon cheeseburger from the to-go bag for lunch, her visor raised, hunched behind the shield of his back to keep from adding the extra protein of wind-killed bugs to her meal, and he did the same without the benefit of a broad back to use as a wind- and bug-break.

            They did indeed make Nebraska by dark, and he found them a no-tell motel just outside of Ralston, not far past Omaha, near the border with Iowa. They had stopped for gas in the bigger city, and had gone through the drive-through of a burger joint to grab dinner. The food was cold by the time they got to the motel and checked in, but she ate it anyway, exhausted after being on the back of a motorcycle for 18 hours. She suspected she would have been excruciatingly sore as well, if not for her healing factor, which dissipated fatigue poisons far more efficiently than if she had been merely human.

            The stink of a roadkilled deer in the ditch right in front of the motel was cloyingly foul, but she pinched her nostrils shut and tried to ignore it. The motel was all but empty--there was just one other vehicle, a battered van parked at the far end of the row--but Logan came out of the motel office grumbling anyway.

            “Something wrong?” she asked him.

            “Asked for a room with two beds,” he growled. “Clerk tells me none of the rooms are set up like that. Just queen beds.”

            She arched a brow. “I can sleep on...the couch?” she suggested.

            “No couches. No recliners. Bed, table, office chair,” he said as he led her down the row of rooms and unlocked the door he stopped at.

            The inside of the room was fairly basic; marginally clean, a musty smell of age and damp to it, with a queen-sized bed, a bedside table with a lamp and an alarm clock on it, a TV on the dresser, a small table/desk with a worn chair. The bathroom--sink, tub/shower, and toilet--were not a separate room, just set behind a wall divider with no door.

            She sat and ate her dinner; Logan turned on the TV before doing the same. The black-and-white set showed a fair amount of static, and after a few minutes, he turned it off, got up from the desk, and grabbed a pillow.

            “Sleeping in the bathtub,” he grunted.

            “Your call,” she said indifferently. “I don’t bite, so you’re safe if we share the bed, but I get that you don’t want me--” She broke off; he was giving her a weird look. “What?”

            He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said finally. “Your dad’s lessons in mind-shielding are more useful than I thought.”

            She arched a brow at that, and badly wanted to look through his thoughts to see what he meant, but he wasn’t tapping on the side of his head and inviting her into his mind _now_ , so she refrained.

            She watched him carry the pillow into the bathroom, listening to him kick off his boots, then climb into the tub. She ground her teeth in frustration as he settled in for the night; then she slowly gathered up the take-out bags, balling them up and shoving them into the garbage before she headed out of the room to cry.


	15. The Color of a Kiss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the road again.

_“_ A rose by any other name  
Would get the blame  
For being what it is--  
The colour of a kiss,  
The shadow of a flame.  
  
A rose may earn another name,  
So call it love;  
So call it love I will,  
And love is like the sea,  
Which changes constantly,  
And yet is still  
The same.”

_\--Tanith Lee_

 

**Westchester, NY**

**Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters**

**Tuesday, June 21, 1983**

           

            The night had cooled off considerably from the scorching heat earlier in the day, and Lauren settled down on the raised lip of the sidewalk where it met the parking lot tarmac.

            Hot, angry tears stung her eyes, and even as she heard a door open and close further down the line of rooms, she swiped them away on her arm. The stink of decay from the dead deer over in the ditch crowded against her nostrils, and the roar of semitrucks passing from the road made her head throb.

           She glanced over at the sound from the opening door. A lean, balding man who looked to be in his late 40s carried his ice bucket over to the ice machine to fill it. He saw her looking at him and nodded politely, but without a word.

           The man went back into his room, and she guessed absently that he was the owner of the van parked at the far end of the row. As his room door opened and closed, she heard a very faint sound from inside, something like a puppy’s whimper.

           _Ah_. She had reached out with her mind automatically; it had become more than a habit, more like a reflex these days.

          It was not a puppy.

          The man was not the father of the one who had whimpered.

          Only some of the stench of death was coming from the dead deer in the ditch. The rest of it was coming from inside his van.

         The man’s thoughts crawled with evil, vile thoughts and images cascading through his brain, and even now--having crawled out of the bathroom window in his room--she could mentally see him, coming up behind her. She didn’t have to lift or turn her head to see him with her mind’s eye. He had a hypodermic syringe in one hand, held shielded by his body so no one could see it, and moved bare-footed as quietly as he could.

There were ‘trophies’--body parts--of four dead girls in his van.

She sat there, elbows perched on her knees, observing his thoughts even though the sickness of them made her want to vomit.

When he jammed the syringe full of Thorazine into her shoulder and depressed the plunger with his thumb, shooting her up with enough drugs to sedate a moose, she just sighed. Her healing factor nullified the pharmaceuticals the second they entered her system.

“When I was 13, I was kidnapped by an evil mutant who held me hostage and raped me for five years,” she said as she got to her feet and turned around. His eyes had gone wide, but he was mute as he stood there frozen, held captive by her mind. “I decided when I was freed that I was never going to be a victim again. I haven’t always managed to keep that vow--there are other evil mutants out there--but you?” She gave him a contemptuous smirk. “As badass as you think you are, you’re just a human.” She watched his eyes get even bigger. “Oh, didn’t I mention? I’m a mutant, too.”

She could feel him wanting to scream, and was all too aware that Logan had come to the door of their shared room, looking out at them.

 _Dad is wrong,_ she thought bleakly to herself. _I **am** a killer. Judge, jury, and executioner._

“Go walk out into traffic,” she commanded coldly, planting the order deep into the man’s brain. “In front of one of the big trucks.” The empty hypodermic still hung from her shoulder, and as he started to stumble across the parking lot toward the highway, trying to fight her command without any success, she reached up and plucked it out, carrying it inside the motel room with her.

Logan sniffed the air as she passed. “Thorazine,” he growled. “What--?”

“Serial killer,” she said absent-mindedly. “He has a twelve-year-old tied up in his hotel room.” She heard the sound from the road outside, a big truck trying to brake in time, the heavy air breaks squealing, and then a thump. “He came out for ice while I was outside. If you ice the parts you cut off your victims, according to his brain, they stay fresh--and edible--longer.” She looked up, her gaze haunted. “At this particular moment, I would give up my time gift completely if it meant I didn’t have to have a copy of _him_ in my brain for the rest of my life. I’ll never be able to wash enough to feel clean.”

“Jesus,” he muttered.

“He hadn’t started on the girl yet,” she said, feeling sick and far away and distant. “When the cops come to answer the call about the dead guy, they’ll trace him to the motel room and the van. She’s scared--a runaway--but he hadn’t started cutting her up yet. She’ll be okay, with enough therapy.” She closed her eyes for a moment.

“You okay?” he asked, his voice coming from right next to her where she sat on the bed.

“Shock, I expect,” she said without opening her eyes. “What he did--what he was doing--was very...triggering. Too much like Creed. I expect my healing factor will reset my system soon enough.”

He made a sound in the back of his throat and then she felt a weight settle on the bed next to her. His arms slid around her waist and shoulders, warm and strong and comforting, and she turned to rest her face against his shoulder and wept, her tears soaking into the thin, worn cotton of the t-shirt he wore.

His other hand came up and he stroked her hair, a sigh leaving his lips as he tried to calm her, reassure her. His touch was very gentle and she leaned into it, craving that comfort as she had been in the weeks since they had freed her from Creed’s sub-basement.

By the time they heard the sirens of the sheriff’s department and the ambulance, pulling up in the parking lot outside, she had mostly cried herself out. She was exhausted, and didn’t fight him as he pulled her shoes off and moved her up to one side of the bed, drawing the sheet halfway up over her.

She reached out, briefly, to the mind of one of the deputies she could hear outside, planting the seed in his thoughts to check with the motel clerk, and then the van and the rooms. “The cops will knock on all the doors, in time,” she said, her voice gravelly from crying. “I need to hide myself from them when they get to ours, or there will just be too many questions.”

He gave her an amused look. “Don’t try to teach your grandma to suck eggs,” he laughed, his voice rough but his tone gentle.

She propped herself up on one elbow and regarded him from where she lay, red-eyed and pale and tired. “Jean thinks I’m throwing myself at you,” she confessed, no bitterness in her voice. She didn’t have the energy for it.

He laughed. “Maybe Jean needs to mind her own business,” he said, but there was a trace of sadness in his voice.

There was a knock on the door, and he turned toward it, throwing a glance at her. She nodded at him and he opened the door, bare-footed, hair a tousled mess. “Yeah?” he growled.

The deputy on the other side of the threshold was young, baby-faced and big-eyed, and peeked past Logan into the room as if he expected a pack of wolves to jump out at him.

“Good evening, sir. There was a death out on the road, the sheriff’s department is investigating. Did you hear or see anything odd or unusual here tonight?” the young man asked. He peered into the room, but Lauren sat still, shielding her presence from his visual cortex.

Logan shook his head and ran a hand through his hair, which already stuck up in the classic spikes of bed-head. “Nah, I’ve been asleep,” he said gruffly.

“You’re here alone, sir?” the deputy asked. Logan nodded. “Could I see some ID, sir?”

Logan sighed and walked over to pluck his wallet off the desk, coming back to pull out a New York state driver’s license and an expired Canadian Army ID from its depths and pass them over to the deputy, who could not have been much older than 20. The deputy examined them, then passed them back to Logan, looking up as one of the older personnel out in the parking lot called to him. “Thank you, sir. We’ll be back if we have any other questions,” he said, then turned and hurried away.

Logan shut the door and locked it, then sat his wallet back on the desk before heading back into the bathroom.

             Lauren curled up in the bed on her side, closing her eyes wearily, then opened them again in surprise as she felt weight settle down onto the bed behind her. “Shove over,” Logan said, tossing his pillow down onto the head of the bed by hers, and stretched out next to her, rolling over on his side. She inched over, her heart in her throat, and then he draped his arm over the curve of her waist, tugging her back into the spoon of his body, and a moment later, he was asleep.

             She most definitely was not.

             She lay there rigid for the longest time, heart pounding fiercely, feeling his body pressed against hers. The weight of his arm across her waist--made heavier by the adamantium inside it--was not unpleasant. Just the opposite; it felt like she was surrounded by a protective castle of flesh and bone and metal that nothing could break through.

             It was the safest she’d felt in years.

             It was only the surprise that had kept her frozen for so long. At last, she chided herself not to read more into it than was probably warranted. _The bathtub was probably really uncomfortable_ , she mused.

             At last, she felt herself begin to unwind, felt the tension start to drain out of her body, and she drifted off to sleep with a smile on her face.

  


\--O--

  


             She woke slow, utterly relaxed, well-rested, and unafraid, surrounded by a melting ball of warmth. She dozed, drowsing in that serene river of perfect peace, half-awake and half-asleep.

             She finally opened her eyes. Sometime during the night, she had rolled over onto her opposite side, and now she found herself staring into Logan’s eyes as he watched her, a look on his face that she couldn’t define. He reached out with one hand and gently brushed a stray tendril of golden hair out of her eyes.

             It felt like time stopped for her in that moment, holding its breath. His gaze traveled from her hair to her eyes, then down to her mouth, and at last, he let out a long breath.

             “I’m goin’ to hell,” he murmured, his tone low. “But I don’t care anymore.”

             He drew her into the shelter of his arms and his mouth closed over hers--firm, warm, demanding. It was the first adult kiss she had ever received, nothing like the pecks on the cheek she had received from her adoptive mother and father. Creed had never kissed her--nor would she have wanted him to--and she’d had yet to go on a date back before her abduction.

             She had no reference for what she felt now, his lips plundering hers, hungry, insistent, but with a gentleness to it, as if he was afraid of scaring her--or hurting her.

             He broke the kiss after a moment and she moaned in disappointment, wanting more. He touched a fingertip to her mouth, as if hushing her, his eyes still fixed on hers. That fingertip withdrew, changed places with his thumb, which brushed gently against the hollow of her cheek, drawing slow, languid circles of fire there.

             Her mind whirled as she tried to figure out what had changed. She didn’t want to read his mind, not without his permission and especially not right now. Every time she blinked and looked at him, her connection with time took him in and told her that he wanted her, that he found her beautiful, that he thought she was brave, and stronger than she believed.

             If this was a trick of some sort, she was happy to go on being deceived.

             If she was asleep and dreaming, she hoped she would die in her sleep. She didn’t want to ever wake up and lose this moment.

             “Tell me no,” he murmured.

             “I can’t,” she whispered. “I don’t want to. I don’t know how.”

             “Tell me no and I’ll stop,” he repeated, his eyes intent and fixed on hers.

             She shook her head wildly. Every inch of her was yearning toward him like a flower stretching up toward the sun. “Never,” she said softly, trembling all over.

             “Last chance,” he said, and he sounded almost anguished. “Please.”

             “Don’t you understand I can’t?” she begged. She didn’t want to hurt him, and she didn’t understand the source of his reluctance. Was he afraid of her father? “You’re all I think about, all I dream of. I’ve never wanted anything more in my life.”

             The sound he made then was what she imagined a dam might sound, if it broke: a deep, hoarse, almost animal sound, the sound of an indomitable will shattering.

             His arms came up to seize hers, just above her elbows, and he rolled her over onto her back, rolling with her until he towered over her. His mouth came down on hers again, but this time it was not soft or gentle; there was no restraint in it whatsoever. It was as if he was trying to devour her, starting with her lips.

             His hands fisted in her hair, tilting her head back with a deep, intense growl, and his mouth moved southward to her ears, then down her throat, nipping, his teeth scraping against her ivory skin.

             Then his lips fastened tight where the base of her throat met her shoulderline, to the side, and his tongue suckled hard there, a bloom of heat and pressure, and she knew it for what it was, she and the other girls in school knew about hickeys. The thought ‘ _he’s marking me as his!’_ raced across her mind and she moaned, long and low in her throat, arching against him in raw need.

             “Jesus,” she heard him whisper as he pulled his mouth from her throat, and her gaze lifted to his face. His pupils had gone huge, widening until there was nothing visible of his irises, his eyes blown black with desire. She knew hers had to look the same.

             From somewhere, he found the strength to try to drag himself to a stop; she saw the resolution in his eyes. His gaze went from her face to the blue-black mark on the softness of her throat and he made a pained sound, shaking his head.

             “Laure--don’t--I can’t, this isn’t right,” he choked, trying to catch her hands in his. “I can’t--won’t--hurt you like he did--like...my brother, Jesus--”

             She moved her hands too fast for him; he was distracted, slow, and she caressed his cheek with one, ran her other down from the apex of his chest down to his belly, her fingers sliding along the waistband of his jeans. She could feel his arousal, pressed against the tops of her thighs, near the delta of her hips. She had never willingly been with a man before--Creed was a monster, not a man, and that had never been willing--but she had a head full of other women, duplicates of Raven and Ororo and others, who knew what men liked.

             She did not hesitate to draw on that knowledge now.

             _Maybe it was wrong,_ she thought as she caught one of his hands, drew it up to her mouth, drew his index finger into the hot, wet depths of her mouth, flicking the tip of her tongue against the rough ridges of the pad of his finger. She rolled him back over, sitting up to straddle his hips. He groaned, the sound coming deep from the pit of his gut, sounding almost pained. _I seem to do a lot of things that are wrong,_ she thought dimly. _Convincing people to buy me breakfast, killing serial killers...seducing Logan. But if this is wrong, it’s still the rightest wrong thing I’ve ever done._

             His breathing had intensified, and he lay there now, muscles tensed, twitching every so often like a horse surrounded by a pack of wolves. She could smell his need now, and there was a dark spot, just a little one, slowly spreading where his rigid shaft stretched the worn denim of his jeans.

             She pulled her t-shirt off, tossing it onto the chair halfway across the room, and her bra followed a second later. The little bits of sunlight that filtered through the closed blinds dappled her skin with stripes of golden light, and he growled softly, his hands coming up to grasp her waist possessively. She ground her hips down against the bulge in his jeans, and that was all instinct, no help from the others in her head required.

             She caught the bottom hem of his t-shirt and tugged him up with it into a half-sitting position so she could draw it off over his head. Instead of throwing it away, she lifted it to her nose, inhaling his scent deeply. When they had finally gotten to the motel last night, he had been soaked in perspiration after the long ride, and she breathed that into herself now, sweat salt and musk and something indefinable that was purely him.

             She wished that she could teleport like Kurt or phase like Kitty, because she needed to take off her pants and underwear to continue, and his, and she was afraid he would bolt. _At least he can’t lock himself in the bathroom,_ she thought wryly.

             But before she could get off him, he reached up and caught her by the wrists, drawing her down to lay atop him, naked chest to naked chest, the line of her slim, delicate body pressed against the length of his muscular frame. He was uncharacteristically tender as he held her there, just breathing.

             “The first thing I felt the first time I saw you was grief, ‘cause you were dead,” he said quietly. “Or so I thought. Then horror and rage. If I’d seen Creed then, I would’ve killed him without hesitation. No one knew you had a healing factor like mine, but I didn’t think Chuck needed to see you with that collar on. So I took it off, and after a bit, your healing factor kicked in and you woke. I was...relieved. Happy that the Professor’s daughter was hopefully gonna be okay.”

             His stare was fixed on her, unblinking, intense, and his hands came up to frame her face, his thumbs stroking her cheeks again.

             “And you did get a little better. Physically, you were fine, except for the scars Creed left on you. I winced every time I saw ‘em. Your dad had to stop me five different times from going down an’ killing Creed. I wanted to--God, so much.”

             She was captivated by what he was saying, and the sound of his voice--husky, heated, full of emotion. She planted her hands to either side of his face so she could prop on her elbows and stare down at him.

             “When ya finally started relaxing a tiny bit, the occasional smile, a laugh at breakfast, I was...overjoyed. I finally thought you were starting to recover. Yeah, you had a couple of little spats with your dad, but what teenager doesn’t?”

             One of his fingers came up to trace along the lush curve of her lower lip, and she whimpered as a shot of hot, hungry need pulsed through her. “And that’s when I started to realize how much I wanted ya,” he said quietly. “Scared the hell outta me. I’m an old man, and you’re just a little girl, but worse, I’m blood of the man that hurt you. The same stuff flowing in him flows through my veins. I couldn’t risk hurting you. So I started to stay away.”

             She shook her head in a mixture of confusion and denial. All the times she had examined his timeline, his memories in her head, and she had never seen this. How much else was she missing--and why?

             “But I wanted you. As much as I hated myself for it, I wanted you. And then I kept getting little hints in your smell that you wanted me the same way,” he growled.

             She blushed, but nodded.

             “To be honest, that scared me even more,” he admitted. “All I could see was how bad Creed had hurt you--almost killed you. I ain’t the monster he is, but I’m a savage. I couldn’t take the chance of hurting you. I did everything I could think of to keep you away--I was mean, insulting, sarcastic, snide, impatient, cold. Better to hurt your feelings than your body. I wanted you to be as scared of me as you were of Creed. It was the only way I could think of to keep you safe.”

             She smiled a little sadly. “I’ve never felt safer in my life than right here in your arms, Logan.”

             He winced. “And then that gang of assholes attacked the mansion. I wanted to lock you in your room, have you hide, but I couldn’t; with Jean and Chuck both gone and Quire locked up, I needed a telepath to help find the other students to keep ‘em safe, and to find the intruders to take ‘em down. So I used you, even though you got hurt when they attacked the mansion, and then that bastard Scrambler took your powers away--” She could hear his breath catch in his throat, practically taste his fear. “All it would’ve taken was one shot from the big guy with the gun, or a knife from that tornado guy. With no healing factor...you’d’ve been dead. And they were right there, and I couldn’t get you away, and then what did you do? You stepped in front of me to take any attacks they’d have aimed at me.”

             His hands tightened convulsively where they had dropped back down to the soft, rounded curves of her hips, and she knew she would have bruises for all of about 60 seconds before her healing factor took care of them.

            “You stepped up and those two big fuckers came to rip you in half and I thought I was gonna throw up. And the minute they touched you, they died.” He looked up at her in wonder. “And I realized that even though you had almost nothing in the way of training, you could take care of yourself.” He drew her back down against him, leaned in to bury his face in the crook of her throat, drawing in a deep breath of her scent, and then growled softly, hungrily. His mouth trailed fire against the silken skin of the line of her throat.

            “And then I went to check on Quire and disappeared for…what, an hour?” she asked.

            He shook his head. “Nah, nowhere near that long, not with Kitty coming back yelling at the top of her lungs that there were invaders on the Danger Room level,” he said. “I knew you’d just gone down there with her, and when you didn’t come back up with her…” He gazed down at her for a moment. “I was scared. I wasn’t gonna admit it to anyone, but your dad knew. He and Hank got home just as I went charging down there and he came with. We had the choice of chasing Quire and the stranger with him, or going to find out what happened to you. Your dad tried using a mental blast to knock them out, but Quire’s strong—he shielded both of them and they got away.”

            She tilted her head and looked up at him. “You’ve met the stranger before,” she said. “You just don’t remember him.”

            “I do? Shit, part of the missing memories,” he growled. “I want all that back. Before we go home.” He frowned. “Might be best to do it before we get to Stryker’s base.”

            She nodded. “My father wanted me to wait, wanted to do more tests. But I think at least giving you that subset of memories would be fine.” She was troubled by his memories of the Cajun thief; ‘Gambit’ had promised not to her hurt her, and had kept that promise, even keeping Quire from killing her…but he was working for Mr. Sinister. That didn’t bode well, and didn’t mesh with him having escaped from Stryker. But Logan’s memories of the Cajun were not bad ones.

            Logan shook his head. “You’re like me. The healing factor means you can get hurt, but you always get better. That fucker last night in the parking lot…I woke up and realized you weren’t here, went to look out the door just as he jabbed you with the hypo. I was about ready to lose it, go berserk…and you just turned around and spoke to him and he frog-marched himself out into traffic. You pulled the needle out and came back into the room and I could smell what it was, but you didn’t seem affected by it at all. Except then you started crying.” His face twisted in pain. “And all I could do was ask you why. By then, I just didn’t give a shit any more about keeping you at arm’s length. You’d taken everything I could throw at you and you still wanted me. Still stuck around. Still wasn’t running.” He stroked her hair. “So I’m done trying to get you to run. It makes no sense to me at all—you could do so much better than an old, broken-down roughneck berserker like me—but I want you until you come to your sense and go find someone better.” His voice was hoarse with longing and emotion.

            She stroked the side of his face, feeling the whiskers there bend under and tickle her fingertips like the prickles of a caterpillar’s stripes. “I’ve wanted you since I first laid eyes on you,” she said, very softly. “When I didn’t even know what wanting was. I don’t care if Dad is mad or if Jean hates me or any of that. When I was a kid, I did what I was told and it didn’t keep me safe. Didn’t make me any particular sort of happy. Just looking at you makes me feel like I’m made of fire. After everything I’ve been through, I want to be happy. I think I deserve to be. I want you.”

            He sat up, inching her off his lap, and reached for the buttons on his pants, but she reached out faster than him, seizing the top one, and his hands closed over hers. He looked up at her and she smiled and undid them, pulling them down over his hips. She was surprised to see that he had nothing on under them, not boxers, not briefs, and his shaft sprung up from its confinement, smacking against the coarsely-furred plane of his lower belly.

            She giggled, she couldn’t help it, and he arched a brow, then burst out laughing and grabbed her around the waist, bearing her to the bed. His hands found the fastenings on her own jeans and undid them, drawing them down over her long, smooth legs, leaving her wearing only a pale blue pair of cotton panties.

            His laughs faded and he stared down at her in tender, reverent awe, and she looked up, meeting his gaze with her own. He slid his hands up along the outside of her legs, past her knees along her thighs until he reached the briefs, sliding his hands under the cloth at the side before drawing them back down her legs and casting them aside.


	16. Alone and Forsaken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's important to remember, when things are bad...
> 
> ...that they can always get worse.

His gaze was so intense and focused it was nearly frightening. “So beautiful,” he muttered, reaching out with one hand to brush the top of her left thigh with his fingertips, the caress as gentle as he was capable of.

Lauren shivered, her stare drinking him in, the chiseled muscles of shoulders and chest and abs, arms and thighs and hips. There was a light dusting of sable body hair everywhere she looked that did nothing to hide his almost painful beauty.

His finger traced back over the top of her thigh; her flesh was radiant, flawless, and then something nudged his memory and he frowned. He could very clearly remember carrying what he thought was her dead body out of Creed’s cabin, naked, and he could very clearly remember the hundreds of scars covering her body from Creed’s claws--most on her back and shoulders and backside, but plenty on her hips and thighs and arms, and even a few on her breasts.

But all the scars on her thighs, her stomach, her breasts and her hips...were gone. The ones that remained were all on the back half of her body.

He frowned. “Where’d they go?” he asked, tracing the spot where one had been, a particularly ugly mark, long and wide and deep, where Creed’s claws had gouged out a soft chunk of her flesh during his maddened, uncontrolled lust. It had left a jagged, sunken, purple track almost a full inch long, knotted and twisted across the sweetly-curving outside of her thigh, over to the top of the inside of her thigh near her vulva. An inch longer, he remembered thinking, and it would have slashed off the lowest half-inch of her lip.

She dropped her gaze. “We have to talk about this right  _ now _ ?” she asked, her voice unhappy and wavering.

The question was enough to tell him he wasn’t going to like the answer. There were really only two ways the scars could have vanished, and he didn’t think she would be so reluctant to talk about it if her healing factor had erased them naturally once the collar was off. Too, if that had been the case, he would have expected them  _ all _ to be gone, not just the ones on her front.

He nodded, his stomach doing slow somersaults and clenching in on itself. “‘Fraid so, Lauren,” he murmured, trying to make his tone gentle.

Her voice was terse with anxiety when she finally answered, all the anticipation and pleasure and joy drained out of her face. “I can’t get rid of my memories, but I don’t want anything else that reminds me of the years Creed kept me in captivity,” she muttered. “He marked me as a way to show I belonged to him. But I reject that. Couple days after I got to the manor, I borrowed the sharpest knife I could find in the kitchen, poured myself a hot bath, and started cutting the scars away. My healing factor makes it so the cuts heal without new scars, or the old ones coming back.” Her face brimmed full with frustration. “But I’ve taken off as many as I can reach. My arms aren’t long enough to reach the ones on my back, and I’m not telekinetic. I can’t lift and manipulate the knife with my powers to get those.”

It was exactly what he had been afraid she was going to say, and he felt like he was going to throw up.

“Kid...didn’t that hurt?” he asked helplessly. He was startled to find tears in his eyes, and blinked them back furiously. He hurt for her, for everything she had been through at the hands of his bastard brother.

“Not as much as Creed making those scars in the first place did,” she said steadily.

He leaned forward and slid his arms around her, drawing her up into his embrace, his chin resting against her shoulder. He could smell her, not perfume or shampoo or deodorant, just her natural scent, a mix of something like apple blossoms--pure and clean and innocent--and musk, a more primal and sensual aroma that tugged at the root of him, sending a pulse of raw animal need through his gut. The surge of hunger made his shaft lift and harden and flex; thinking about what Creed had done to her had gone a long way toward making him wilt, but now the scent of her in his nostrils made it stiffen again.

He laid her back down on the bed, their discussion forgotten, looking down at her with need. Her eyes had gone hungry with want again, her body soft and yielding, and she parted her legs just a bit. The little movement brought the smell of her desire to him and he groaned; the scent went straight to the animal core of him. All he wanted to do was take her, and he fought to keep himself in control.

He lowered himself down on her, supporting himself on his hands at either side of her shoulders, his hips fitting into the space between her parted thighs. He saw her shiver as the coarse hair on his legs brushed against the inside of her soft, pale thighs, and the little moan that followed made his cock surge and jump again, leaping against her mound. Even with just that brief touch, he could feel how wet she was, how much she wanted this, and he shuddered.

“Please,” she moaned, reaching out to grasp his hips. Her small hands were warm and gentle but insistent, trying to draw him closer, and that simple touch nearly unwove his control.

“Slow, little girl, slowly,” he murmured, his voice as soft as he could make it, though the animal inside his head was roaring at him to take her, that she wanted it and it wouldn’t matter if she didn’t, that she had given herself to him, that she belonged to him now. His heart was pounding savagely inside the cage of bone and flesh that was his chest, his breathing coming harsh and fast.

He tried, desperately, to make her understand. “You got no experience with sex except for what Creed did to you,” he muttered, reaching out to caress the side of her face and run his fingers through the sleep-tangled strands of her golden hair. She arched up to meet his touch with a moan. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t been a virgin for five years, Logan. You’re not going to hurt me. You’re not  _ him _ . You don’t think that you own me.”

His hands were shaking, and the beast inside him was inclined to argue with that last part, but he said nothing, knowing she would likely see it, anyway.

And really, it didn’t matter. He couldn’t resist her any longer, anyway.

He bent his head and kissed her, his mouth feathering snowflake-soft over hers for all of two seconds, before she parted her lips and he could taste her. Then it was like the moment he had kissed her earlier, as if she was some tasty dessert he could devour. One of his hands found a breast, small and pert and soft, and he ran a thumb in circles over and around her nipple, feeling it tighten and crinkle under the rough pad of his thumb. He growled low in his throat as she writhed underneath him, and swallowed her moan, managed to tear his mouth away from hers, and lowered it to her other breast. She gasped as his lips closed over the rose-pink crest, feeling it go pebble-hard as he raked his tongue against the silken flesh.

Her hands were anchored up over the line of his shoulders, fingers splayed wide, and her hips rose and fell against his, a beckoning invitation he couldn’t resist. He gritted his teeth, trying to drag this out for her, but he could smell the intoxicating perfume of the honey dripping between her parted thighs, could see where her juices were soaking into the sheets in a slow-spreading wet spot even though he had not entered her yet. The skin around his balls was drawn up tight, hugging the bottom of his shaft, and he was more than a little worried that he was going to spill the second he got inside her.

Even accounting for his missing memories, he could not recall having ever wanted anyone so badly in his entire life.

“Please,” she begged, a breathy hitch in her voice, the sound enough to drive him crazy. “Please...I can’t...I need you…”

“Shhh, sweetheart,” he rumbled, taking himself in hand, running the swollen head of his arousal along her wet seam, rubbing it in slow circles over the tiny pink pearl he could see peeking out of its hood. She made a soft sound, all raw desire, her hips arching upward in need, and he lined himself up with her entrance and sank into her as slowly and gently as his splintering willpower could handle.

Lauren let out a broken, wavering moan as he guided himself into her depths. Her skin felt too hot, too tight, and without realizing she was doing it, her hands tightened on his shoulders, her nails leaving little crescent-moon dents in his skin that vanished instantly.

Every kiss and every touch that Logan had shared with her up to now had built up to an inferno under her skin, but as he plunged into her, stretched her, filled her, she trembled under him, mind and body together undergoing a tsunami of ecstasy. She could barely breathe; she had been trembling with want even before his mouth and hands had touched her, and every action since then felt as though it had been tailor-made to drive her insane with rapture.

He flexed his hips, drawing back out slowly, almost teasingly, until only the head of him still remained buried inside her, and then he began to rock back and forth, sliding in and out, and it felt so good that Lauren wanted to weep, but she was afraid he would not understand why. Creed’s touch had never brought her even an iota of pleasure, never anything but terror and agony and despair, and this bliss was its own form of healing.

She could feel Logan quivering with every stroke, feel the leashed control he was trying so hard to maintain, and every time she looked up into his eyes, she could see the emotion brimming inside them--not just with her own eyes, but with her gift, as well.

“Laure--” he choked, hands curling under her, pulling her up into him even as he thrust down into her again. “I can’t--I’m not gonna--much longer--”

Time held no secrets from her. It had been all of seventy-two seconds since he had first plunged into her depths.

Seventy-two seconds was more than enough.

She went rigid underneath him, feeling her innermost core clench tight around his hardness, slick fluids bathing his shaft as she reached a peak she had never even imagined possible before. 

A startled grunt escaped Logan as her inner channel tightened around him. He felt her heat and her wetness, caught a glimpse of the look of rapture in her eyes as her delicate features contorted, and then he was erupting inside her, no more able to hold back than a volcano could when tectonic pressure built up enough. Hot seed spurted from him in long, sticky ropes, painting the inside of her tunnel white, and he groaned under the unbearable onslaught of how good it felt. He curled into her, arms around her slender form, burying his face in her hair, and she shivered against him and rested her face against his chest.

They lay entwined in perfect silence for a long time, one of her slim legs tangled between his, Logan half rolled over onto one hip so the weight of his adamantium-bonded skeleton wouldn’t crush her. Her breathing was even and slow and shallow, but he knew by her scent that she wasn’t asleep. She smelled of joy, pure and simple, and every so often, the soft, warm curve of her lips would draw a ghostly, fluttering kiss along his shoulder or collarbone or the topmost swell of one of his pectoral muscles. The light, gentle touches were almost-- _ almost _ \--innocent, but he knew that in any moment other than these drowsy, languid seconds immediately after they had both been satiated, even those lightest of touches would have the power to rouse him to full, urgent, primal need again.

“We should probably shower and get dressed and go have breakfast,” she said quietly after awhile. She was loathe to break the tender silence between them, but Colorado was still a day ahead of them.

“Think the shower’s big enough for us both to fit in there at the same time?” Logan asked after a moment, his voice rough with emotion. His fingers trailed gently over the ridges and furrows of scar tissue mapped out across her back.

“Probably?” she answered. “I’m small, after all.”

He nodded, reluctantly untangling himself from her, and got to his feet, then reached out to take her hand and tug her up. She offered him a tentative smile, almost shy, and he pulled her forward into his arms with a groan and kissed her all over again. His mouth was voracious on hers, starving, as if he had never before known passion or comfort or love, and she melted into his embrace with a soft, yearning cry.

When he pulled away at last, a shadow lay over his face, and he shook his head, mournful. “This might just be the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he muttered. At her wounded, broken look, he shook his head. “You deserve so much better than me, little girl.”

“Isn’t that my choice to make, Logan?” she demanded, defiant. “My decision? Creed thought he got to make that decision for me, too.”

He glared. “I’m nothing like him,” he growled, seizing her arms sharply, a spike of rage spearing through him. She cried out as metal-bonded fingers tightened on her biceps strongly enough to leave bruises.

He let her go at once and shook his head, though he was cringing inside. “There, you see?” he muttered.

She looked at him bleakly. “From the moment I woke after you carried me out of Creed’s cabin, I have known just one thing. Just one. The entire time he held me captive, I wanted only one thing, and that was to die. I didn’t want to escape because I knew it wasn’t possible. I didn’t want to kill him because I knew I couldn’t. I just wanted him to go too far and accidentally kill me, because it was the only way I was ever going to be free. And when I woke up, and I was free, and I saw your face, I knew I had a reason again to want to live. Don’t you fucking dare take that away from me, Logan,” she growled, the obscenity shocking from her soft voice.

He tugged her into his arms. “Aw, Christ, kid, don’t make  _ me _ your reason for living. I disappoint everyone who counts on me.”

She clung to him, her tone a bit shaky. “Sorry, too late,” she said, looking up at him.

He pressed a kiss against the top of her head. “C’mon, let’s go shower and get dressed. There’s a decent-looking restaurant we passed half a mile up the road that looks fine for breakfast, and then we can top off the gas tank and get on the road.” He took her shoulders in hand and set her back a bit. “Are you going to be okay for this?” he asked warily. “The Marauders you killed--your powers were messed up, I know it was an accident.”

“‘Accident’ doesn’t mean I didn’t want them dead, Logan,” she said quietly. “If my powers would have worked right, I would have used my mental blasts until their brains ran out their nostrils and ears like cherry Kool-Aid,” she said, quiet but fierce.

He looked troubled, but he nodded, heading into the bathroom ‘nook’ and turning on the shower, letting the water run until it was very, very warm but not scalding. “Careful,” he warned her.

She stepped under the hot spray without a wince. “I was cold for five years,” she said calmly. “This is heaven.” She flashed him a grin.

He smiled faintly; it was good to see her smile. “Turn around,” he said as he stepped in. “I’ll wash your back.”

She winced. “Be...be gentle,” she asked. “A lot of the scars...still hurt.”

He cursed under his breath at that, but waited until she had turned, running his fingers over the thick crazy-quilt of scar tissue. It was the only ugly thing about her, more because of all the pain and anguish it represented rather than its appearance...though that was not exactly beautiful.

She shivered as he traced as many of the distinctive marks as he could identify; so many of them melded into one another, becoming a lumpen monstrosity, that it was impossible to tell how many there truly were. Hundreds, for certain, and possibly over a thousand.

He took down the tiny, paper-wrapped bar of hotel soap and unwrapped it, his nostrils flaring. The scent burned his nostrils; it just smelled like chemicals to him, but she only shared his healing factor, not his augmented senses, and it probably smelled flowery to her, he figured. He lathered the soap up with the washcloth and then carefully began to wash her back and shoulders and hips.

She leaned against the tiled wall of the shower stall with a soft sigh, relaxing as he washed her. Under the mantle of scar tissue, he could still count all her ribs, and shook his head.

“Logan?” she said tentatively. “Would you do me a favor?” she asked, her voice guarded.

He arched a brow. “Depends on what it is, little girl,” he rumbled, leaning forward to press his lips in a kiss against the nape of her neck.

“You won’t like it,” she warned him. “But...I need it.”

He frowned. “What is it?” he demanded.

“I’m thinking your claws are a lot sharper than any of the knives in the kitchen,” she said softly. “And you can reach my back.”

He realized instantly what she was asking him for, and his stomach lurched in violent revulsion. “Jesus Christ, no!” he yelled furiously, jerking back from her, not even wanting to touch her at the moment. “How could you think I’d agree to...to  _ skin _ you?” he blurted.

She said nothing, and he fought to keep from putting his fist through the wall, a whirlpool of rage unfolding inside him, eating everything it touched. He reached out and turned the water off, stepping out of the shower, grabbing a towel and marching back out to the bedroom. “Get dressed!” he snarled back over his shoulder. “You can eat and you can tell me where Stryker is in Colorado and then you can get on that bus back to Westchester like you said. I ain’t taking you with me another mile.” He couldn’t even look at her without seeing the thought her words had put into his head--her crouching in front of him, bleeding and screaming as he peeled strips of scarred skin off her back with his claws. The images kept juxtaposing themselves with how he had seen her as he had held her in his arms as they made love--small, delicate, fragile, innocent, her gaze full of love.

“You hear me?” he yelled, enraged. He wanted to throw up.

There was no answer from the little area that was the bathroom, and belatedly, he realized that the hotel room seemed to a bit brighter. He stepped back around the divider, his nostrils flaring as he caught the scent of terror and despair and loss and desolation and hopelessness.

The backpack and clean clothes she had brought into the bathroom with her and set on the toilet seat so she could change after showering were gone.

And the window stood open, bright sunlight pouring through it to illuminate the suite.

“Fuck,” he growled, dashing to the window. The back parking lot of the motel was empty, a weedy vacant lot littered with broken brown beer bottles, crushed soda cans, wind-blown fast food wrappers, and an old, rusty, discarded car muffler with a ragged hole in it big enough to stick both his fists through.

The faintest hint of her scent hung on the breeze, apple blossoms and musk slowly dissipating among the stink of diesel exhaust, human and animal urine, puke, stale beer, and the green, stringy scent of the spindly, half-grown brush that grew against the chain-link fence that bordered the lot: mulberry trees, last year’s dried mullein stalks, ragweed, and dandelions.

“No no no no no--” he growled desperately. He yanked on his jeans and raced out of the room, shirtless and shoeless, looking around wildly. The police had towed away the killer’s van last night, and the door to the motel room he had been staying in was blocked off with yellow ‘Do Not Cross’ police tape. Cars and trucks went back and forth on the highway at easily 70 mph, not bothering to slow as they went past the offramp to the motel.

Her smell had faded completely.

She was gone.

Acid churned in his gut as he prowled the lot, aching, ignoring the broken glass that slashed at his feet over and over again, searching for even the tiniest whiff of her scent to tell him which way she had gone. But there was nothing whatsoever; the stench of car exhaust and filth had overwhelmed the delicate scent of apple blossoms and musk, grinding it down and crushing it into the dirt. 

At last he stalked back to the motel room, his head full of recriminations as he pulled his clothes on. Only there in the bed they had shared could he still smell her, and he yanked the sheet up off the bed, holding it to his nostrils.  _ I knew she was damaged. Knew she wasn’t all healed. Knew she was doing her best to put on a brave face. And then she asked for one little thing and I lost it. Shouted at her...Jesus, she must have been so scared. After all the trust she put in me...I all but turned into Creed. No wonder she ran away. But fuck...what am I going to tell the professor? _

  
  
  


Logan gritted his teeth as he met the gaze of Xavier’s mentally-projected doppelganger. 

“You slept with her,” Xavier said flatly, his tone seething with barely-contained fury.

“Yep,” Logan admitted.

“And then she asked you to--” Xavier grimaced, his face contorting in anxiety and worry, “--to perform a...a-a medical procedure on her--”

“Seriously, Chuck? Your daughter asked me to skin the scars off her back. That’s black market cosmetic surgery at  _ best _ , and torture at worst,” Logan said.

Xavier lifted a brow. “It didn’t occur to you that it would have made more sense--rather than yelling at her--to suggest that we could have performed such surgery in the operating room of the infirmary, or Hank’s lab, with a nice clean scalpel? I know anesthesia wouldn’t work on her, thanks to her healing factor, but I could have used my own gifts to throw up a mental block to keep her from feeling any pain. She told you that her scars still hurt. That does not strike me as a frivolous desire for cosmetic surgery from a shallow teenaged girl, Logan,” Xavier’s voice had gone low with worry and hurt for her.

Logan winced. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, stomach knotted tight. He remembered those words in the shower, those pleas that he be gentle when washing her back...because of the pain.  _ I fucked this up so bad, _ he thought starkly.  _ I tried to warn her. I’m nothing but a disappointment to those who count on me. _

“I am going to try to locate her with Cerebro,” Xavier said. “You need to stay where you are. When I find her, you will be the closest to where she is, to retrieve her.” A muscle ticced in his cheek. “I am working hard at reminding myself that my daughter is at least technically-- chronologically--an adult, Logan, but it isn’t easy. After all the trauma she’s been through, this was the last thing she needed. I don’t know how big a setback this is going to be for her, but it’ll almost certainly impair her recovery. I don’t use the word ‘betrayal’ very often, but that’s what this feels like.”

Logan snarled, clenching his fists. “Don’t kid yourself, Chuck. I know you ain’t got much practice at this dad thing, but your daughter is a human being with human needs. I take my fair share of the blame for what happened, but the problem is how I reacted to the favor she asked me for, not what we did in bed together. I wanted her and I won’t lie about it, but that girl...she was begging for it.”

The words had barely left his lips when Xavier roared, and white light smashed into his head like a runaway train, all blinding pain, and then he was falling.

  
  
  


Lauren sat in the furthest back seat of the station wagon, wrapped around her backpack, the other kids in the car arguing and yelling and screaming cheerfully even as their mom yelled from the driver’s seat. It had been easy enough to make the harried mother driving the car think she felt her tire going flat so she would pull over at the motel offramp, then get out to check on it. Lauren had used her telepathy to create a sort of blind spot in the mind of mother, kids, and everyone driving by so she could get into the car unseen, unheard, and unfelt.

Now they were headed west; the mom was taking her kids to Disneyland. Lauren rather suspected that  _ she _ would get out somewhere in Colorado. 

When she had asked Logan to help her with her scar tissue, she had not expected him to roar at her in rage. For one moment, as the panic attack hit, she could only stand frozen and trapped as he stomped out of the bathroom, the blood turned to ice in her veins, flashing back uncontrollably to every time Creed had hurt her. He had never done it out of rage, of course--or at least, not rage directed at her. There had been a few times he had come back from an unsuccessful mission and taken it out on her, but it seldom lasted long, and he always took off the collar, afterward, so she could heal after he had beaten her into a coma. It was not out of any special care or concern for her, she knew, just a desire not to have to get a new bed toy if she died.

But it had been a shock to be on the receiving end of a similar fury from Logan.

Once he stepped away, she had unthawed, and every act that had followed after had been on automatic, out of survival instinct. She had reached out with her mind and frozen him in his tracks, in mid-word; he would have no memory of time passing when she let him go.

Then she had gotten out of the shower, dried off, dressed, and grabbed her things before climbing out the bathroom window.

It had only been when the car she had hidden inside, in plain sight, was more than a mile away that she had released Logan’s mind and began to cry.

“Mom? There’s a strange girl back here!”

The voice and the car swerving wildly woke Lauren, and she yelped, red and yellow light spilling across her face from the McDonald’s sign. Five sets of eyes were gaping at her from the seat in front of her, and she cursed under her breath as the car came to a stop in the offramp restaurant parking lot. Her eyes burned from all the crying she had done earlier, something her healing factor couldn’t do much about, and she realized that she had dozed off out of weariness and despair and shock.

She had made love with Logan when they had woken, a little after dawn. It was dark out now, as the car had pulled over for a late road-trip fast-food dinner, and the mom slammed on her brakes and got out of the car, yelling as she came around to the back door and yanked it open.

“Who are you? How’d you get in my car?” the woman howled shrilly, and Lauren winced. “Get out of there, you bitch, I’m going to call the police--”

“I’m sorry,” Lauren pleaded, “please don’t, I didn’t take anything, I didn’t hurt anyone, I just needed to get away--”

She cried out as the woman sank a hand into her hair and dragged her out of the car with the grasp, tumbling her down on her knees onto the blacktop. She felt her skin shred, blood blooming on the tarmac, and then the wounds closed of their own accord in front of the woman’s eyes and the angry mom screamed.

“Oh, Jesus, you’re a mutie--” She ran, back to the front of the station wagon, throwing herself behind the steering wheel and slamming the driver’s-side door shut.

And then she backed the car up, and Lauren screamed as the 1978 Dodge Diplomat, over a ton of Detroit steel, rolled over her slender body, crushing bones, pulping muscles and organs, and tearing open skin as the car raced away, leaving Lauren bleeding out on the pavement.


End file.
